Maritius
by KonisForce
Summary: The saga of Maritius, the 15-year-old Arm commander on Adriata. Rated T for some language and mild alcohol and drug references.
1. Prologue

Author's Note: _I owe a lot of this story to previous pieces of fan fiction written about the Total Annihilation universe. A lot of people put a lot of creativity into thinking up realistic ways to explain in-game phenomena, and how to then fit those explanations into the basic story framework provided by the game. Because of this, most of my thinking in these terms would not have happened if I hadn't had the fanfic that went before to spark my creativity. It might take a bit of searching, but there is plenty still out there regarding this 'ancient' game, and it is worth finding and reading._

_I am putting a glossary of sorts at the beginning of the story, so that anyone who is confused can check in here and read up on the basic assumptions I am making. Those of you who enjoy puzzling it out yourselves can just jump in and figure it out as you go along. I try to explain things in the story as well (for the best possible example of someone who does this very well, read _Anathem_ by Neal Stephenson), but if it is ever too unclear, refer to the glossary._

Author's Note, February 8, 2010: _It's been quite a while since I put much work into this, but with a renewed interest I am attempting to move forward. As a first step, I have been going back and updating all previous chapters. This is to serve the twin purposes of updating the original writing to adapt to changes in my own style, and to re-familiarize myself with the story. As an added note, I have played significant amounts of Supreme Commander, and am currently eagerly awaiting the release of Supreme Commander 2. Since these are both Chris Taylor games and are the 'spiritual successors' to Total Annihilation, you will probably find me straying into Supreme Commander territory. I will probably cut down on the use of unit names and start trying to describe them based on their military function (e.g. mobile artillery instead of Luger, light infantry K-bot instead of Peewee, etc), but I plan on keeping the general feel of the story intact. The ARM and Core will still be the major combatants (at least for now . . .) and the basic technological assumptions related to the 'lathes, Galactic Gates, clones and Patterns, and all the rest will remain as they are. But there will be a handy story-telling reason for the infusion of new units, too._

Author's Note, March 15, 2010: _I've changed my mind again for a few major reasons - SupCom 2 was a letdown, and the basic assumptions about technology are just not compatible between the Total Annihilation universe and that of Supreme Commander. I do plan on adding in new units designed by Maritius and the other ARM soldiers, as well as some of the giant 'experimental' type units. Krogoths are just too much fun not to have more of them around . . .  
_

ARM: One of the two major combatants in the world of Total Annihilation. When the Core first began uploading their minds into electronics, the ARM resisted the move to a machine-based consciousness and all that came with it. The ensuing war has been raging for millennia.

Core: When the technology became available to upload a mind into electronic format, the Core began pursuing this extensively. The change also brought huge cultural shifts, as would be expected from an entire culture that can exist without physical bodies. Core citizens who pilot vehicles and K-bots will typical create a 'backup' copy of their Pattern before being downloaded into a machine body and going into battle. They control the vehicle directly, as if it were their physical body.

Core Central Consciousness: Those within the Core who do not have a specific task are part of the Central Consciousness. This is seen as a humiliation, because it means ones brainpower is being used essentially as a single circuit in a massively complex, larger computer. The Central Consciousness has hardware somewhere, but guarding the location of that hardware is one of the primary goals of the Core.

Nanotechnology: Nanotechnology is the major advance which makes the sort of base-building seen in Total Annihilation possible. The assumption here is that all building is performed by a construction machine pouring nanobots onto a structure. The nanobots are microscopically tiny, programmable machines. Each is given specific orders to move to a particular location and become part of a structure, vehicle, etc. Many of the nanobots are un-sophisticated; they know just enough to move to a particular spot and became part of a wall or piece of armor. Other parts of the vehicle will be formed by more complex nanobots; electrical systems, for example. This explains the different 'tech levels' of construction vehicles.

'Lathes: This term can be used either for a nanolathe or a resource lathe. The nanolathe would be the specific machine possessed by construction equipment and the Commander. This allows these vehicles to 'lathe a structure, by pouring out nanobots. Resource lathes are used to explain the fact that aircraft don't need to refuel, or that a seemingly endless stream of nanobots can come from a single construction K-bot, or that storage tanks can be built across the map from the original base and still be functional. The assumption is that resources are teleported to these 'lathes, which refill storage tanks within vehicles and 'bots.

Teleportation: In the Total Annihilation universe (as I see it), teleportation is clearly possible. It has two constraints, however. If only one side of a teleporter is powered, the trip is one way. Both sides need to be powered to make two-way travel possible, but once the initial holes are created on both sides, the power to maintain it is essentially the same, regardless of size. Secondly, the amount of energy needed to create or maintain the 'hole' through space increases dramatically as the hole gets bigger. For example, two holes, each an inch across, are much cheaper to create and maintain that one hole two inches across. Because of this, the teleportation involved in resource 'lathes is usually on the order of single molecules. For vehicles with bigger resource needs, there will be more 'lathes, each with a hole that allows single molecules to pass through. Additionally, the resource 'lathes are one-way leading _into_ the vehicles, and the power necessary to keep them open is provided in the storage facilities, where the resources are teleported _from._

Galactic Gate: Based on the constraints of teleportation I outlined above, Galactic Gates are enormously expensive to power. They also connect single points – each Gate leads to one other Gate. Therefore, for a Commander to be sent through a gate requires a massive amount of energy in the starting location. For the gate to be opened in both directions, an equal amount of energy must be applied on the other side of the gate to open the 'hole' at both ends. Once both sides are open, however, the energy needed to maintain the open Gates is much less that the energy necessary to open them in the first place. Once a presence has been formed on a planet, the Galactic Gate will typically be opened just wide enough to allow a data cable to be run back to the original world. This allows communication between the worlds - and the exchange of news, unit designs, brainwave sets, etc - until enough power can be generated to fully open the Gate.

Cloning (Core): Because they lack physical bodies, citizens of the Core clearly cannot reproduce. This is overcome in two ways; copying and merging. Copying is the most straightforward; a citizen's Pattern is copied onto a different set of hardware, and then begins to exists as a new person, essentially. The two Patterns are, at the moment they are copied, identical people for all intents. From that moment, they begin to lead separate lives. The Core will generally try not to post two different Patterns who are from the same copy to the same base, and they try to keep them separate. But at any given moment, there may be millions of copies of the same original Pattern serving in different posts throughout the galaxy. These all come from the same core personality of a person who was uploaded from a physical body to the Central Consciousness millenia ago. Merging is an attempt to take two different Patterns and copy them into the same Pattern space. This always produces a new Pattern, but rarely produces one that is not deeply flawed in some way. The number of distinct Patterns is quite large, however, so it would be conceivable for a whole planet to be occupied by Core Patterns and none of them be copies of another.

Cloning (ARM): Clearly, the Core have an advantage in terms of creating new soldiers at a moment's notice. Because it is only feasible to send the Commander through the Galactic Gate, it was necessary to find a way to send hundreds or even thousands of soldiers along with him, but not have to take their physical bodies. ARM scientists took the same theoretical constructs that were used to make Patterns feasible and used them instead to create technology for brainwave sets. This is a way to essentially take a snapshot of a human brain's state and compress it. When a new human body is created, the brainwave set can be decompressed into the flesh-and-blood brain. In most cases this allows both body and mind to be created. Therefore, there are multiple copies of ARM citizens running around the galaxy, much like the Core, but each has a physical body. 'Natural' clones are people in essentially all respects - an adult physical body will be grown in a cloning facility, the brainwave set downloaded into it, and the combination decanted. These citizens pilot vehicles and K-bots through cockpits in the suits or vehicles, like any other human. Generally they are physically jacked into the vehicle through a mind-electronic interface. 'Standard' clones are a compromise of sorts. Instead of cockpits, these vehicles have cryogenic support hardware. A clone is grown that exists mainly of a small, stunted body and a fully-functional brain. The body and brain, with brainwave set installed, are placed in the vehicle. The mind-electronic interface allows these 'standard' clones to pilot vehicles in the same way as natural clones, but they never jack out of the vehicle. When this was first tried, it was seen as a compromise and something dangerously close to Core values, so it became part of ARM culture that 'standard clones would be, whenever possible, equipped with an 'android' body. When they were offduty and their vehicle was parked somewhere, they could interface with their android and use it to move about the base as a standard human would. 'Standard' clones are typically made necessary either by a lack of living quarters, or by some flaw in the original DNA which is incompatible with full cloning technology.

Cloning Registry: The sum-total of all brainwave sets of ARM citizens. A commander carries a subset of the Cloning Registry through the Gate. Not all citizens are worthy enough soldiers to be entered in the Cloning Registry. All ARM citizens undergo basic military training throughout their childhood and teenage years. Once a citizen is of age, they are subjected to a huge battery of tests. This ranks their aptitude for various tasks, and they may or may not undergo more specific training at this point. Eventually, worthy citizens are entered in the Cloning Registry, where a clone of themselves will be created on new worlds once the commander Gates into position.

Gate Memories (ARM): An ARM brainwave set is created when a citizen has undergone an extensive basic training, usually when they are between twenty and thirty years of age. Because of this, a brainwave set would normally have absolutely no real combat experience (though plenty of simulator training). When a person is cloned on a combat world they begin to gain combat experience. If that world survives long enough to run a data cable through the gate (or even open the gate fully), it is common for a clone's brainwave set to be sent back through the gate. This is then integrated into the personality of the brainwave set stored in the Cloning Registry. Because of this, a clone will be 'born' on a new world with Gate memories of hundreds or even thousands of battles, fought by copies of themselves on worlds throughout the Galaxy. Because so may Commanders never manage to activate a particular Gate, this is only the stories of particular clones who survive long enough to have their data sent back to the central planets. Additionally, some Gate memories are not included in the personality in the Registry, either because they are unstable or would cause too much emotional damage when decanted in a newly-cloned person.

Investigator: A Commander is the ultimate authority on the battlefield, and battlefields encompass whole worlds in the war. Commanders are also cut off from their superiors - the only people higher-ranking than a world's Commander are back through the Galactic Gates. It is rarely possible to get a Commander back through a gate for a court-martial. Because of this, the ARM instituted the Investigator program. Certain people are trained extensively and authorized as Investigators. The Commander then carries this brainwave sets, along with thousands of others, onto the new world. If a Commander's actions are called into question, the Investigator - pre-trained and pre-disposed toward searching for the truth - can be decanted in the cloning facility. They will then investigate the Commander and decide whether or not the Commander is a detriment to the ARM fight on that particular world. As there can be no replacement Commander, removing the Commander is a large step. In extreme cases, the Investigator can submit a recommendation that the brainwave set of the offending Commander be examined or even wiped from the Cloning Registry, so that copies of the Commander will never again exist in ARM space. Investigations are rarely reported; by the time a Commander has jeopardized a situation to the degree that an Investigator would be called, it is rarely possible to salvage it enough to open the Gate for data or travel. Thus, most attacks are on their way to disaster long before an Investigator arrives.


	2. Foothold

Maritius stared down at the flat, unnatural color of the Galactic Gate. It was a solid black plane stretched between slabs of machinery of enormous complexity. The Gate seem to absorb all light around it, hence the flat black, and yet his mind would not stop telling him that there were strange rainbow patterns dancing across its surface, like oil spilled on a stretch of obsidian ground. He shook his head, and the near-silent popping of metallic muscles adjusting to their first use reminded him where he was.

He felt a hand on his shoulder and turned around to see the Commander looking at him. "Maritius." The voice spoke directly into his mind - cords of flesh vibrated by air were picked up by a small microphone, translated into a digital format, beamed through redundant short-wave radio and tightburst laser beams, then piped into Maritius' mind and reassembled by the digital processors into the input from a sixth sense, which nevertheless tricked his mind into thinking it was from his ears. Even with all the different steps it took on its journey, the voice was still full of inflection and emotion.

Maritius simply nodded. He knew he must go through the Gate because he'd been preparing for it for nearly his whole life. His earliest memories were of this Commander. No one knew this Commander's real name or designation any more; it had been ground off his suit long ago by laser blasts and bullet holes, and he wouldn't tell anyone anything of his past. His skin and armor was one solid block of patches, spots where all color had been burned from the nanobots, and bare metal. The Second considered it a waste of nanobots to fix something simply for aesthetics; his Command Suit could walk and fight, and was therefore good enough. His body had long since wasted to the point where he was, for all purposes, a standard clone - incapable of leaving his command suit. He could have gone outside - given enough machinery and enough incentive - but he was essentially imprisoned inside that kept him alive.

All that was known about him was that he was one of the three ARM Commanders who had carried the battle to the stars. Whole sections of the galaxy had fallen to the tactics and plotting of those three, and the geriatrics and cloning techniques which now served trillions of ARM citizens had been developed almost solely for their benefit, so great was their impact on the war effort. He was the second of those three Commanders and therefore asked that he be called, simply, the Second Commander.

The Commander had taken Maritius in when his parents had been killed in a 'raid' that had wiped a planet clean of resources and life. Maritius' parents had been brilliant military strategists. Some had said that his mother was well on her way to becoming a Commander, making them the first husband-and-wife Commander team, when they'd died. But that had all been finished when Maritius was very small, and he'd been taken in and raised by the Second Commander, with his heritage in mind, to be groomed as a new Commander. Maritius had gone through a phase where he had read everything that was written by, for, or about his parents, but at some point he had come to terms with the fact that they would never be more to him that words on a page. Now he studied their tactics as if they were just any other military theorists, from Sun Tzu of Old Earth to Tannhauser of the Final Republic.

He was only fifteen years old, but he was ready. Or so the Second thought. He had said, in all honesty, that there was not a single thing more that he could teach Maritius. In the early years, Maritius had been trained by other strategists and tacticians, with only infrequent visits into the simulators by the Second Commander. But for the last year, the Second Commander had been spending six days a week in the complex simulators, putting the finishing touches on the masterpiece that was Maritius' military knowledge. Maritius had piloted every vehicle and K-bot, had died hundreds of times, and had fallen victim to and devised new strategies every day, until he could learn no more. Now he had to do it himself, and keep learning while he did, or else he would be swept under by the wave of time and the Core forces.

"You are ready, Maritius. Do not doubt yourself."

"I know, sir."

"If you doubt yourself, you doubt me, you know." The Second chuckled, a pleasant wave sloshing against the insides of Maritius' skull. "It's times like these when I wish we knew your first name."

"I think my name suits me fine. And it serves as a better remembrance of my parents."

"They were fine people. They would be proud." A pause, tinged with sadness. "I am proud."

"Thank you, sir." Maritius had never told anyone that the memory of his parents had receded in the way it had, but it made moments like this so much easier. So much cleaner.

Maritius waited a moment, but the Second spoke no more. Maritius turned around.

He felt a hand again on his shoulder to stop him, and the second reached out and tightened a screw that held on the small solar panels that looked like tiny diamond-shaped wings. "Good luck," he said softly, then stepped back.

Maritius flexed his left hand and felt the muscles pop and snap as they moved, not yet worn into their new roles. They'd get used to working soon enough. He hefted his right arm and looked at the stubby D-gun that topped it, knowing that the fate of his mission on this new world rested, most likely, in that gun and how he used it. The fate of the entire ARM offensive toward the core of the galaxy.

With a sigh, Maritius stepped forward onto the platform over the gate. His arms were straight out, for balance. Then, like a diver with a deathwish, he tipped forward and dropped into the Gate.

He fell for an eternity, with his computer counting the time the whole way. He dreamed, and slept, and ate (or thought he did) until finally two months, fifteen days, thirty-two hours, and thirteen minutes later, he dropped to his hands and knees on the other side of the Galactic Gate. He checked the readout and stopped to wonder, because the planet he'd come from had only a twenty-eight hour day. Galactic Gates always wreaked havoc on computer systems.

Sensors and warnings immediately started pinging his attention, alerting him to Core units in the area. He had a single panicked moment when he searched wildly for the enemy, worried for his life. He'd died hundreds of times in the simulators, usually in excruciating pain. Probably more excruciating than his real death would be, he'd often thought. But the stakes had never been so high as they were now. Then, he simply flipped a switch and was again alive. Here, now, the switch was one-way.

He found the unit that had set off the alarms and mentally chastised his computer, which sulked like a kicked dog, moaning some excuse about the Galactic Gate. It was a single solar collector, probably not even connected to a grid. Maritius got to his feet and looked around.

A small metal bridge led across a deep ravine, twelve or fifteen yards across. The Galactic Gate was behind him, perched atop a small hill, and in front of him was a wide clearing, almost a perfect semi-circle, with jungle growing in a half circle, ending at the ravine on both sides. Maritius strolled forward, D-gun held high, and checked his batteries. With the high-density exchange battery bank in his Command Suit, and the slightly larger solar collectors, he had 1,200 EU in storage, and could replace them at a rate of 35 per second. He set his computer to do quick calculations, taking in the strength of the sun, ambient temperature, wind speed, and the like, to begin writing an OBP - Optimum Base Program. Of course, Maritius had never heard of a Commander following, or being able to follow, an OBP, but it was a good guideline to the first few steps of any incursion.

The mechanical hand of his left arm split like a flower and folded back in on itself, exposing the combat laser beneath it, as he moved onto the metal bridge. He stomped once to test its strength. He walked across it and found himself in the clearing on the other side of the bridge.

Six plasma shells suddenly appeared above the forest, arcing towards Maritius in stately arcs. Laser-fire burst from the trees around him, and he found himself again on the verge of panic. Suddenly his battle computer kicked in. Its familiarity calmed him and let him take stock of the situation. He interfaced with the computer on the Commander and everything suddenly slowed, the plasma shells crawling across the sky. With the help of the processors, he counted each laser that hit his body and, using the knowledge of the exact speed at which he was traveling, calculated exactly where each was coming from. He brought up his own laser to fire - his arm's movements agonizingly slow to his high-speed, computer-augmented mind - and his D-gun came to bear on a collection of four AK's hiding in the trees.

After two quick shots from his laser, his D-gun fired, it's warm glow spreading up all the way to his shoulder as the quick burst of indescribable non-matter flew from the complex gun. He was rolling on the ground, and therefore not able to watch, as the D-gun blast tore through two of the AK's and caused the other two to explode. The six shells struck around him, three catching his legs, as he rolled away. Ironically, his only thought was, "There goes the paint job." He suddenly understood the Second Commander's position all too well.

As he rolled onto hands and knees, he registered six Thuds in a smaller clearing, farther away, bombarding him, and a total of fifteen AK's, now reduced to eleven. While he could defeat them, undoubtedly, it would be a Pyrrhic victory at best, and the repairs he would need to ensure his own safety would set back building his preliminary base. He needed a way out.

He stood and began running back towards the ravine, the world speeding up slightly as his processor speed and the short-term drugs which sped his own mind began to slow. Six more shells, a more ragged volley this time, arced in over the trees as Maritius neared the edge of the ravine. He dove as they exploded and more laser fire from the AK's lightly played over the armor on his back.

He then used one of his favorite tricks, something he'd devised and which had shocked the Second Commander when he'd first used it. His hand snapped back out around his laser and the nanolathe embedded in his palm sent a stream of nanobots against the far wall of the ravine. As they came in contact with the wall, they sent information back along the stream which let Maritius adjust his build orders to have the tiny robots seep as far into the cracks of the ground as they could go, solidifying into an anchor once they had found purchase. Using the nanobots as a high-tension wire, Maritius got his legs facing the far wall as he flew through the air and struck the wall, letting his legs absorb the shock. He pushed off and let more nanobots out of the 'lathe, using them as a rappelling line, and bouncing down to the ravine floor. At his electronic command, the nanobots became semi-fluid once more and slid back into his storage tanks.

The OBP came in and he had just begun a radar sweep for metal deposits when more trouble struck. His radar, having trouble reaching outside the ravine, registered three independent radar signatures, each with the same direction and velocity. He looked up quickly, trying to find the source, and spotted three Rapier gunships in a powered dive, speeding towards the ground.

He looked both directions down the ravine quickly, but decided running again wasn't an option. He brought both laser and D-gun to bear, checking his batteries quickly. The three Rapiers dropped into the ravine, one in the lead and the other two close behind, with staggered altitudes so they would fit in the tight space. He fired his D-gun at the nose of the first.

They each loosed their missiles, four apiece, as the shot sped towards the first Rapier. The gunship rolled desperately and a bit too wild. It skipped off the ground up-side down but managed to escape the shot, while one of its mates was not so lucky. The Rapier erupted in a ball of flame, energy, and metal shards, knocking the Core unit next to it off course. It smashed into the ravine wall, sending shrapnel flying. The final Rapier, still inverted, was speeding towards Maritius as the twelve missiles hit him, knocking him off balance as the tiny anti-matter warheads erupted, ripping through tough armor and sending him reeling. The Rapier then struck him, knocking him to the ground, and went spinning off down the ravine. It came to a stop a few hundred feet down the ravine. Maritius toyed with the idea of capturing it for his own use but the list of reasons against it was long; he had no pilot, did not want to leave the Command Suit empty to pilot it himself, and didn't want to spend the time and resources to design a cockpit into the Core ship. He simply reclaimed it as he began repairing himself.

He quickly checked his own health before heading off to find a site for a base and found that he had only dropped to 93% health during his battles.


	3. The Peewee Raid

His radar sweep located metal deposits behind the hill that the Galactic Gate was perched on, though they were weak. He thought of trying to climb back out of the ravine, but decided against it, since he would then also have to battle the rest of the Core K-bots. Instead, he turned his D-gun on the ravine wall and fired, sloping upwards, using it as a digging tool. He waited a few seconds before climbing into the hole to let his solar collectors gather more energy before going underground, then he climbed in, crawling upward.

He had to recharge from his internal fusion reactor and fire the D-gun twice more before emerging on the far side of the hill on a gentle slope. He conducted a visual, radar, and broadcast sweep and found nothing. The K-bots on the other side of the hill hadn't followed him, so he put them from his mind for now. He drew out two specters from a compartment in the command suit's leg and, glancing once up at the clouds skidding across the sky, drove one into the hillside until the entire shaft was buried in the dirt. With a tough of his finger and burst of nanobots, a command was given to the object. Explosives in the base launched the upper portion into the sky, where the protective shell split in two and dropped to the ground. A diaphanous shape spread out of it and stiffened as the wind caught the spreading wings. The tiny wire paying out from the base of the object went taut, and the entire kite stopped moving downwind. The wings turned toward the sun and a small propeller began spinning in the wind, and both wings and propeller began pumping energy back down the cable. Maritius smiled up at the kite - an design of the Second Commander - then planted and launched the second. The second deployed as well while Maritius poured his nanobots onto the ground, where they skittered and maneuvered into the foundations of a mine.

Three days went by while Maritius built up the base, laying down solar collectors and light laser towers. He had his computer make an electronic, three dimensional map of the base he was building, and when it was completed, his spent a few hours laying down nanobots to serve as a backup wire power grid, to run electricity between his points of production and his defenses and metal mines. He placed mines where he could, but metal was rather scarce.

Maritius began to miss sleep around his sixth day. His mind drifted into daydreams while he was nanolathing the K-bot factory, but his eyes remained fixedly, stubbornly open. He thought of the planet, and what he knew of it - not much. The Galactic Gate here had been closed for centuries. He had decided to call it Adriata, in honor of his mother. He would find out later from a Core consciousness what the Core designation of the planet was, but until then - and probably after - it would be Adriata. He wished he could just close his eyes to pass the time.

He didn't need to sleep, of course, not biologically. Before each Commander went through a Gate, they were given a soup of nanobots, benevolent viruses, bacteria, and drugs, which meant that they would stay awake for three weeks straight, Standard time, and the revolution of Adriata took slightly under twenty-five hours. He wouldn't be able to sleep for another two weeks, at the earliest, and he had the drugs to keep himself awake for another two months after that, although tissue degeneration would begin after five weeks of being awake.

It was simply the price of being a Commander. His flesh was blurred until it was almost mechanical in some respects. The jack that let him talk to the commander's computer was set in the base of his skull, and microprocessors to monitor his body functions were installed in arms, legs, heart, head, and gut. A tube ran into his armpit to pump drugs into his system which kept his performance at peak and his brainwaves regulated and efficient. And, the one that bothered him most, was the tube in the base of his ribcage where his food went. He would be too busy for a long time to come to feed himself, and therefore, he hadn't tasted food in six days. He could eat, of course, but to eat would be to disrupt a carefully planned diet, which he couldn't afford to do for a few months to come. Once the beachhead was firmly established, he could relax. But for the moment, he had to be more disciplined than most humans - regardless of age - thought they ever could be.

Of course, the price of being a Commander, being nearly non-human, was paid for by any clones that were made for specific vehicles. The standard clones (not the so-called 'natural' clones) were simply a stunted human body topped by a brain, in all respects, equivalent to a person's. They lived their lives in a life support tank, floating in a soupy mix of chemicals and preservatives. Their limbs were those of their machine, their senses, the electronic signals sent from sonar, radar, and camera. But they were conscious, and intelligent. Where does sentience truly live? In the body? The mind, more likely? Would an exact copy of the mind still be sentient? The Core thought so. But this wasn't a problem for Maritius to worry about. He simply needed to keep fighting, to ensure that if someone wanted to worry about it, they would be free to do so, not wired in the Central Consciousness.

He spent the seventh day conducting a sweep of the surrounding area, outside the sweep of the radar tower he'd set up just behind the Gate. He crossed far to the west and south to sneak up behind any units still lurking south of the Galactic Gate, where he'd first been ambushed. He picked up a small group of AK's and Storms on his radar and could tell by their electric signatures that they were damaged. His first good news since arriving, this told Maritius that there wasn't a base nearby, most likely, and that if there was, it was too damaged to see to fixing its units. He surprised them and destroyed three of them with a single D-gun blast. Whoever was commanding them was skillful, though, and the AK's formed a defensive wall and drew fire while the Storms targeted key points of Maritius' commander. He fought back with his laser and occasional D-gun blasts, the battle raging fierce and quick, wandering over the terrain, and ended up with 500 units of metal salvage and a solar collector blown off. He had to hold the collector in place while his nanobots self-repaired him, but he was soon back at peak efficiency and headed towards the Galactic Gate.

By the seventh day, Maritius felt confident that he'd cleaned the area enough and developed an infrastructure that would allow him to begin the true colonization of Adriata. He began 'lathing the cloning facility, the structure that took care of producing the biological bodies which would pilot his first vehicles. His commander carried a brainwave sets on board, a few thousand or so, and millions of DNA sets in cold storage. The brainwave sets were not Patterns. Certainly not, because if they were, Maritius would be fighting for the Core, not the ARM. They were not Patterns because they did not feel, or think, or even react to anything. They were simply a snapshot of a brain that, when decoded by the cloning facility's computers and fed into the biological body built from the corresponding DNA set, allowed the computers to 'install' a fully-functioning, adult, human consciousness into an adult human body.

Maritius entered a few rudimentary instructions for his commander and set it on autopilot, again wishing desperately that he could simply go to sleep to pass the time.

* * *

Maritius crouched in the second-growth redwood rainforest, the product of a long-defunct program to seed appropriate planets with Earth-like flora and fauna. The trees, smaller and less developed than first-growth redwoods, let in more light and allowed for undergrowth on the forest floor. Of course, though Maritius fancied that he was as stealthy as a jungle cat, he in fact stood out like a tropical fish in a school of salmon. The twelve Peewees marching near him managed at least to crouch behind boulders and trees, but he could barely keep his huge commander frame from sticking out the forest canopy when he stood.

The first deployed Peepers had found a small outpost to the north, apparently a gathering of Core units that had banded together after whatever had caused the disarray of nearby Core forces. A group of solar collectors and wind generators, too far away to capture, but too large to leave producing power, had been the only thing in a radius of two-days' foot travel that had caught Maritius' attention. So he had brought the entire fighting force of the ARM outpost, twelve Peewees, to destroy it.

The repeated Peeper sweeps had found no trace of radar equipment, but had also apparently alerted the Core units to the ARM presence. And while Maritius knew that the group manning the outpost was made up of civilian Patterns, Crashers, and Thuds, he didn't know how many of each there were, or any of their typical reconnaissance and patrol patterns. Both sides were fighting blind.

"Units two and three, both head north, and see what you find. There should be a small rise with the wind generators on it. Do not engage, and avoid any patrols."

Affirmative replies came twice, once from each unit leader. The eight Peewees trundled off through the forest, EMG cannons swinging at their sides. Maritius then sent the four Peewees still with him forward through the trees to scout, accepting, at least tactically, that he was not as sneaky as he would like to be.

The first of the Peewees, farthest forward, reported back within a few minutes. "There's a bunch of Thuds and Crashers milling around the center of the compound," she reported. "A few Crashers patrolling farther out, I think, judging by the pattern of radio chatter. Maybe . . . twelve Thuds, eight Crashers in the compound? There might be more, I can't see around a few larger buildings."

Reports confirming the pilot's statement came in from the other three advance scouts, and were corroborated and added to by the eight Peewees once they circled into a position where they could see.

"Well," Maritius said aloud, "nothin' to it but to do it. Shall we?" He stood and began running, the heavy Commander suit lumbering up to full speed as it crashed through the small trees. Even before he was fully out of his crouch, sensors began wailing in Maritius' mind as Thuds and Crashers tracked him.

He brought his D-gun up and fired quickly, the recoil slowing him slightly and the shot barreling through three Crashers before disappearing into the ground. He was even with the four Peewees around him when he saw the other eight burst out of the forest from the north, firing on the Crashers.

"Primary target Crashers," he said as he raised his D-gun to fire again. Three missiles wound their way into the side of a Peewee at his feet and he watched it fall. The reticule in his cockpit told him the damage was severe, and that the K-bot's heavy armour generator was giving up the ghost. Flicking the laser in his left hand shut, Maritius began streaming nanobots from his backpack onto the Peewee where they would begin repairing the damage. Another volley of missiles impact Maritius' leg as he placed it in front of the K-bot.

The agile Peewees were making good use of their speed as they moved among the buildings of the Core compound, playing hide-and-seek with the enemy K-bots where they couldn't use their superior range to their advantage. Other Peewees rallied to where Maritius stood in the field in the center of the compound as he stood over the wounded ARM unit, unable to move, being fired on by most of the Thuds and a few remaining Crashers. He was absorbing hits alarmingly fast, but had plenty of armour left.

Some tactician in the Core forces decided that the Commander was no longer the major target, and that they would try to take any of the Peewees with them they could. Maritius was standing directly in front of two of the already-wounded Peewees, and so a new target was chosen. A dozen Thuds turned in unison to train on the unit leader of the second squad.

"Problem!" she said. Maritius looked up to see the Thuds trained on her. He stumbled two steps forward and dove, keeping his left arm aimed back to pour shining green nanobots onto the injured Peewee that was now wobbling to its feet. He crashed to the ground, landing with a heavy thump on his right side and firing a D-gun shot that climbed out of the underbrush towards the Thuds as over twenty plasma shots screamed toward him. His adrenaline and the combat computer once again kicked in, seeming to slow time itself, and he felt the heat of the plasma shells for long agonizing seconds before the shots finally impacted, one by one, against his armour. The Peewee unit leader crouched behind his antimatter backpack as the shots pelted the large commander frame.

Three Peewees, one missing a cannon, rounded a building behind the Thuds as the D-gun blast ripped through two of them; Peewees on two sides opened fire, tearing into the Thuds. They spun around, only to stop halfway and spin back, seemingly undecided about their next target. Eventually, another D-gun blast from Maritius, aimed to avoid any friendly units, took out the last organized resistance from the Thuds and allowing the ARM K-bots to begin sweeping up. Two squads of three crashers each returned from patrol close to each other, but that battle was short-lived and one-sided. Maritius was even reclaiming a building with one hand while firing with the other, and still easily defeated the Core units.

After reclaiming all the metal he could carry and calling in a Peeper sweep to look for leftover Core units, Maritius looked around at the carnage of the battle, declared it over, and began shepherding the Peewees back to base.


	4. First Line of Defense

Three months had seen many changes to the ARM presence on Adriata. The original infrastructure of the base - a skeleton made of power transmissions lines, mining equipment, scanners, and light laser towers - had been fleshed out with the actual necessities of life. There were living quarters set up, sparse and temporary, along with basic mess and shower facilities. A portion of the power generation was now under the control of an administrative, non-military base computer, which also oversaw the functions of the sewer system and the freshly-built greenhouses. Laser towers that had once guarded the perimeter of the base when it was younger had been converted to light towers to act as basic streetlights. Heavy weapons towers and anti-air turrets now ringed the new perimeter of the base, and two Guardian twin artillery pieces kept watch over a mountain pass where the base pressed against the foothills. Dedicated construction facilities for K-Bots, vehicles, and aircraft were churning out military equipment at peak efficiency. Their pilots, grown in the new cloning facility, were being decanted nearly as fast. And a nursery was in the works; the first pregnancy on Adriata in centuries had been confirmed the night before, sparking a celebration that had some people still drunk the next morning.

The first Peepers out of the 'lathes had been sent out in search of Core forces but had found little resistance. Maritius had led a few Peewees to destroy some solar collectors and wind generators that still remained in the area, but were too far away to capture. With stiff resistance from Crashers and Thuds, Maritius managed to destroy the entire force without losing a single Peewee, although he spent most of his time 'lathing with one hand and firing his D-gun with the other. The pilots were still talking about how he'd stepped in front of a Peewee when a concentrated barrage from ten Thuds had threatened to erase it from Adriata completely. His commander was starting to get the pockmarks from battles that the Second Commander had, though in nowhere near the same amount, and he was inclined to leave his newly-battered exoskeleton looking just the way it was.

In honor of the protection Maritius had shown in the Peewee Raid (as folks were calling it) the citizens of Adriata City had secretly designed and 'lathed the first of the next generation of housing units for Maritius. It was buried underground and came complete with a lounge, kitchen, bedroom, and large wall screens linked to either camera feeds for imitating windows or private processors for recreation. Maritius was laying on his couch, preparing for a nap and scratching idly at his skull jack, when his wall screen flashed with an incoming call. It was Major Mary Jennings, one of his newly-appointed military advisers.

"Meeting, sir?" she said without introduction.

"What's that? Oh, right, I suppose I did call a meeting, didn't I. I'll be there in a sec."

"Very good, sir," Mary responded. Maritius sat up and looked around for the end of the wall jack. He plugged himself into the computer and thought his way into the virtual conference room. The colors were bright and vivid, but tinged green, to remind the mind that it wasn't in a real setting. Most ARM citizens set their virtual interfaces this wan to keep themselves from become addicted to the virtual world and thus turning themselves even more towards the Core's ways. No one knew if Core troops really were that way, but it was a useful bit of propaganda that seemed in keeping with the spirit of the enemy, and had long since filtered into ARM culture.

Mary Jennings was seated at the table, as were Jack Dobson, the 'lather he'd put on the committee, Mark Ryu, the air pilot, and Ryan Storough, a tank specialist with a flare for public relations. He was the impromptu morale officer.

"Alright, I called a meeting." Maritius looked around. "What did I call a meeting about?" Maritius asked. The others laughed, but there was no condescension there. Though he was young, they knew his training and his pedigree.

"Quick update, sir," Jack said.

"Go ahead."

"The second geothermal plant's going to be online in just a few days. I'll have it patched into the power grid almost immediately, and that should give us enough power in the batteries for a full volley from all the turrets, five times over."

"Sounds like plenty to me. Let's hope such a volley is never necessary. Ryu?"

"Scouts have been turning up with nothing. Core resistance is minimal, and what little of it there is seems to be very obviously disorganized. I'd like to ask a rush order on a wing of ten Freedom Fighters when the geothermal plant's done."

"Reason?" Maritius asked. His voice managed to make the single word an order and a question all at once.

"When we find someone, we won't have to send out ground troops. Faster, more effective, less costly, and less risky. Freedoms are quicker than bombers, but they can hit ground targets as well, though not as hard. I figure ten should overwhelm anything we've found out there so far."

"Sounds good. Can you do it, Jack?"

"No problem."

"Mary?"

"Ground forces are doing fine. Everyone's still talking about the Peewee raid . . ."

"Hear hear!" Ryam Storough said. Maritius blushed slightly, looking like he truly was as old as he said he was for the first time since he'd landed on Adriata.

". . . and everyone's repaired and ready to go again. In fact, I think folks are itching for some action."

"Ryan, anything to say?"

"I agree, I think people need something to do. We've got the first stills working, so the bar's being supplied with local booze. That always makes people happy. If there's nothing else going on, we could build some recreational facilities and improve the housing."

"Training simulators first. If they want some action, let 'em take it out on each other. Two hours mandatory simulator work every day."

"Do we have enough simulator capacity for that? Or computer capacity?" Jack asked.

"I've already got a recreational computer building down in the command center. It'll be running soon."

"Well then, sir, it sounds like we should move on in the plan," Storough stated.

Maritius looked up at him and smiled slowly. "That sounds like a plan to me. Mary, could you feed the computer?"

"Certainly." The virtual construct of Mary closed her eyes and blurred, fading slightly as Mary's mind focused on computer commands instead of its location in the conference room. She was combing through data sets, topographical maps, and raw information of power usage and pointing those toward estimates of Core movements, locations of known resistance, and pre-planned counter attacks in the event of hundreds of different scenarios. They waited for a few minutes, chatting idly, until the computer was finished.

"Phase two, OBP." The green-tinged screen shined at the end of the conference room. It showed northward expansion, the building of an advanced K-bot lab, and various moho mines sunk farther to the north. Apparently there was a high likelihood of a strong mineral vein, something the outpost desperately needed.

"Not that we'll be able to follow that precisely," Maritius said, "but it looks like a good idea. Ryu, you'll get your wing, and then it's on to building an advanced K-bot lab."

*****

Maritius watched as the green stream of nanobots flowed from the 'lathe in his palm onto the corner of the advanced K-bot lab, the glowing 'bots clambering up the structural support to find their place in the plan. Two construction aircraft hovered overhead, 'lathing the roof, while all four of the base's construction K-bots marched around the building, sending the miniature robots flying onto the structure. Jack Dobson, piloting an upgraded K-bot that he'd worked on himself, chatted while he stood next to Maritius' huge form.

"Y'see, there actually is technique to nanolathing," Jack began.

"I know, Jack, I was trained, too," Maritius replied warily.

"No, no, you were trained that you should aim where they have to go. This is true. If they have to climb too far, you get traffic jams, and then you get lumps, and then you slow down the project. But it's more than that. If you interface with your computer, you can start picking out things that can be built even earlier than when they land on the building. For example . . ." Jack paused for a while, leaving the connection open; Maritius heard him breathing heavily on the other end, "there was a corner piece right there that I built before it even left the 'lathe. That way it's complete, just has to be dropped into place. Not very big, mind you, but it makes a difference if you put together one hundred nanobots before you send them out. That's a hundred nanobots who don't have to go anywhere once they hit the structure."

"Well, I guess you're just an artist at heart. What exactly did you do to that K-bot, anyway, so that you won't let anyone else touch it?"

"A few little trade secrets. But since we're all in this war together, I guess I can let you in on some of them." Maritius could picture Jack leaning forward with a conspiratorial air. "Improved the 'lathe that teleports in the metal, so that more nanobots get out quicker. I made the fusion reactor a little more efficient, I'm gonna implement that design on all of the new C.K-bots when I get a chance. Let's see, what else. I added a torch to the right hand, so I can break up loose metal when I'm reclaiming. Also does as a weapon in a pinch. And I've got more storage . . ." Jack was cut off by the sharp wail of an alarm.

Maritius was the first to react to the alarm since he was the first to receive it. His mind immediately went into high gear, scanning all the available information from the main computer. Six aircraft were coming in low and fast, with a few more behind them moving more slowly. There were twenty possible ground troops, unconfirmed, since the signatures might simply be ghosts.

People on foot ran for the relative safety of the living quarters, while the on-duty pilots began gathering into units and moving into position.

Maritius watched as Mark Ryu's wing of Freedom Fighters leapt up from the small clearing they used as an airfield and began streaking towards the invaders, engines screaming. His vision zoomed in with a quick thought and he spotted the six bombers. As he watched, two were destroyed by the full volley of the wing of fighters.

Suddenly two of the fighters erupted into flames and tumbled from the sky. Maritius' eye, trained in the simulators for years, picked out the familiar curves of the Vamp. The stealth planes screamed over the base, firing another volley towards the advanced K-bot lab.

The computer confirmed the slower-moving targets behind the bombers as Valkyries, each carrying a Raider. Ten AK's were also confirmed, moving across the bridge towards the Galactic Gate.

Maritius ordered a general attack and the base scrambled into action. K-bots whirled on their pivots, tracking the enemy aircraft as they flew by. A few Hammers lobbed projectiles over the hill if they had a clear shot around the Galactic Gate. The two Guardians on the hill, which had swung around to face the threat earlier, took an idle shot each at the enemy aircraft, but soon gave up and began firing inexpertly-aimed projectiles at the approaching AK's.

Maritius found himself leading an attack up and over the hill, where he was being followed by an unlikely assortment of Jeffies, Flash tanks, and the odd Hammer. The AK's had scattered and were skirting around the far side of the hill, and Maritius mentally commanded the computer to dispatch some forces to deal with them while he personally chased after the four Raiders which had been dropped in and were in the process of destroying a small cluster of mines while they rolled towards his advanced K-bot lab.

Maritius brought his D-gun to bear and spotted two Hammers next to him, seemingly mimicking his movements. Both arms, thick, stubby cannons sheathed in protective armor, came up parallel, and the armor snapped back along the barrels. Twin projectiles streaked from each Hammer, targeting the same Raider, and the Core unit was tossed a few feet into the air, landing with a resounding thump, shakily back on its treads. The Hammers reloaded, plasma streaming back into their barrels for another shot.

Sounds of fighting behind him caused Maritius to check the AK's, and he saw that they were being taken care of by a handful of Flash tanks. The weak lasers of the AK's couldn't track the quick tanks, and they were soon decimated by the Arm tanks.

Three Raiders were moving through the forest along the edge of the base when Maritius fired his D-gun, and soon only two remained. The Flash tanks that had accompanied Maritius over the hill swept down towards the Raiders, followed closely by three Jeffies, unlikely attackers. The Jeffies soon sped past the Flashes, however, and the three quick scouts had overtaken the Raiders, seemingly before the scouts had figured out what to do with them.

One of the Raiders began swinging its turret menacingly towards the living quarters. The Flash tanks began firing, catching the trailing Raider along the treads, but not slowing it by much. His D-gun was almost charged again, but he wasn't sure if it would be quick enough to keep the Raider from firing on the fragile living quarters.

As he watched, a Jeffy accelerated between the two tanks, curved around in front of the first tank and turned sharply to the side to violently hit a tree. The hatch popped open and a tiny figure tumbled out as the tree, split nearly in two by the speedy impact of the Jeffy, tipped dangerously and finally fell, breaking directly over the thick barrel of the Raider. Short plumes of plasma came rushing out along the tank, melting its topside and rendering the weapons systems useless. The tree burst into flames as the plasma poured around it.

The final Raider, seeing its comrade disabled, attempted to swerve around the obstacle but ended up instead stuck on the remains of the tree. It was held in place long enough for Maritius, who'd been running down the slope, to reach it. He began the capture routine, first freezing the turret with nanobots, next invading the control systems and virally destroying the computer, and finally, removing the individuality circuitry.

The Raider pilot identified himself as Karl-0645917, and gave no more information, as Maritius uploaded the Pattern into a partitioned section of the main computer, and then crushed the hardware with a pinch of the command suit's fingers. A Core pilot might be useful later.

The Raider converted, he left it to Mary to oversee its removal, and instead Maritius walked over to the ruined Jeffy. Its pilot had scrambled farther away, needing to escape the sudden heat from the plasma and the burning tree. Maritius hardly noticed as Jack Dobson quickly trundled over, spraying nanobots on the tree to smother the fire before it spread to the forest, so hard was he looking for the pilot. Eventually, however, she stepped from behind a tree and into plain view. Maritius knelt and held out his hand, which she climbed onto, and the walked her the short distance back into camp.

*****

Everyone cheered in the mess hall as Janet mounted the makeshift platform and walked towards the small figure of Maritius. The entire collection of people, naturals, and a few other clones in their android-style stand ins, were in full dress uniform. Maritius leaned over to Janet and ceremonially pinned the medal just above her left pocket, next to a training badge.

"For courage beyond the bounds of duty . . . for personal sacrifice . . . and for risking her own life in order to preserve the lives of so many of her friends and comrades, Janet Donix is hereby awarded the Gold Nova."

The room burst into applause as Maritius finished, the microphone in his throat automatically ceasing its transmission as he stopped speaking. Maritius bowed to Janet, then stepped out of the way to allow her towards the podium, where a microphone was set up. Blushing and too embarrassed to speak, she simply bowed and sat down again.

Maritius declared the feast open and people began eating voraciously. Alcohol from the local stills began flowing freely, and soon everyone had been caught up in the party atmosphere. Janet, grateful friends buying drinks for her left and right, had her hands full with two beverages, and was surrounded by people wanting to thank her. Maritius barely managed to steer her away from the crowds, and she handed off both drinks to people who were without as she walked by.

"A very brave maneuver," Maritius said, drawing himself up. He was still growing, but he was already over six feet, his genetic stock coming from a primarily low-gravity planet.

"Thank you, sir."

"Thank you. You saved the base a very costly re-fit, in both materials and pilots." Janet nodded mutely. "But more importantly," Maritius stated with a smile, "you saved _lives_. I am less concerned with the fact that you kept us on schedule, and more concerned with the fact that you kept us, as an impromptu family, together." Maritius smiled again and walked away, leaving Janet alone with her new respect for her commanding officer.


	5. Northern Expansion

Major Mary Jennings absently scratched her head. As she did, her Maverick Heavy K-bot resoundingly thumped its cockpit, where Mary happened to be located. Major Jennings started at the sound, then chuckled to herself. "You okay there, Jennings?" Maritius asked. His nearby command suit loomed over the collection of K-bots and vehicles.

"Just not used to piloting something so big, Commander," she said. "Or being able to scratch . . ." Jennings was rated Master on PeeWees and other smaller K-bots, where the bot itself was more a suit to be worn than a machine to be piloted.

"Well, just don't beat yourself up about it," Maritius answered.

"Har har, very funny," Mary said with a smile. She ran through the battle plan once more in her head. The defenses surrounding the ARM base were complete, and with the activation of the long-range radar array, a thick jamming signal had been noticed to the northeast. The jamming signal was very strong which meant first; they couldn't see what was up there, but second; it was important enough to jam. It was in the area that the base computers had predicted mineral deposits, and therefore had about a 75% likelihood of being a massive mine complex. Maritius had questioned the captured Pattern, and while it didn't know details, they did manage to get it to admit to a large mine complex somewhere north of the ARM base.

Maritius had decided to stay back with the base, and was sending Major Jennings along instead. The base defenses and a few anti-air and anti-personnel K-bots would stay back with the base to guard against any attack, but things had been very quiet since the short attack on the advanced K-bot lab.

Mary was piloting one of two Mavericks that had come out of the lab's 'lathes, which were working at high speed. They'd also produced four Zeus lightning K-bots to complement the attack party. The rest of the squad was an assortment of Peewees, Hammers and Stumpies for artillery, and a few Samsons, mostly Jethros for anti-aircraft fire. Donix, as Mary now thought of her friend Janet, was leading a squad of six Jeffies that were coming for ground scouting, and Mary was glad to have such an able scout along. Two Markies walked along with the group to try and punch through the jamming, and a few Peepers had been taken from patrol duty to accompany them, giving them visual targeting.

Also along were four Samson-based vehicles of Maritius' design, which he referred to as the David, from the story of David and Goliath. They were a quicker version of the Merl, built because the base was having too much trouble with metal and keeping up with living quarter capacity to begin building another advanced lab. The Davids had been converted to allow them to fit a wider rocket, and their payload had been augmented, making it, in essence, a small two-stage rocket. Their reload was five times that of a Samson, because the more advanced ammunition nanolathes of the Merl wouldn't be available until the advanced vehicle plant was built, but their range was three times that of a Samson, and they could outreach anything else in the ARM's current arsenal.

Raising a metallic arm high, Mary signaled 'go' to the group, and they rolled out, moving slowly to keep pace with the Markies and Zeuses, the slowest members of the group. The Jeffies broke into three groups of two and bounded into the forest, beginning their scan on the ground.

"Good-bye and good luck, my friends," Maritius spoke through the command center console to them as they left. Mary acknowledged the transmission. "Don't wait up," she added, getting a laugh from Maritius.

Over the eight-hour journey, Mary had her subordinate officers arrange sleeping schedules for their warriors. The units, cruising on auto-pilot, could avoid trees and branches and generally keep themselves out of trouble. If anything needed the pilot's attention, they would be awakened, but the terrain wasn't difficult.

There were only a few hours left until dusk when the group moved up to the west of the large hill that was their destination. Long shadows of the taller trees in the forest were hastily creeping up the hill, seemingly racing towards its top. The Markies, more cautious now with their radar sweeps, had still been unable to pick anything out of the clutter.

"Alright, here's the plan. Two equivalent groups break to either side, north and south, and wait for my signal. Keep ten Peewees and five Jethros here to guard the Davids, I want you staying right here. Everyone else, split up as squads and go north or south." Mary switched her communications to a tightbeam to the Peepers. "I need you guys to hop over that ridge and spot the jammer. Simple as that." One of the Peeper pilots guffawed back at her. "I know it's not so easy as it sounds, but you guys are the best. It's what you're there for. You don't need to drop in low and tag it or anything, just spot it. If it starts moving, you tell us where, and the Davids can take care of the rest."

With a chorus of affirmatives the Peewees, little more than engines with wings, began spiraling up, high into the air and away from the hill, hopefully out of range of spotting. They assumed there was no radar inside the base, since if there was, the forces would be under attack.

"Camera check," one of the Peepers called.

Mary held out a hand. It switched to a manipulator with two fingers extended. "How many fingers am I holding up?"

"Oh, c'mon. Two. Give us a tough one, I could spot that from space."

Mary chuckled. She raised her other hand, plasma gun still in it, and held it steady. "Where am I aiming?"

"That's more like it! Nineteen degrees left of center," one Peeper answered.

"Fifty-seven degrees above center," another commented

"Aiming east-northeast," responded a third.

"Alright, you're set," Mary answered. "Go get 'em, boys."

The Peepers, which had circled far to the west of where the ARM units were now, began screaming down towards the small valley on the far side of the hill in a shallow, powered dive. It wasn't long before they blurred overhead and the small jamming tower leapt onto Mary's screen.

She looked over as the four converted Samsons, launchers already raised, each fired twice, two rockets each riding a plume of smoke and fire into the air. Eight engines cut off nearly in unison, and the first stage of the rockets fell away, spinning back towards the ground. The warheads, tiny electronic idiot savants, focused on their target. Mary watched her screen as a camera view from a lone Peeper was displayed. It turned tightly, looking back down at the tower, and watched as the missiles impacted it.

The top of the tower disintegrated under the hail of missiles, the jammer spinning off and landing with a satisfying crunch. The tower teetered for a moment before pitching forward, and the radar feed from the two Markies suddenly snapped onto the screen. Mary could make out the shape of some defenses, she spotted at least four Punishers and various missile towers, the relatively weak Pulverizers.

"Davids, move, you've got Punishers tracking you. Hammers, take out those Punishers. It looks like there's a lot of solar collectors, leave those, but take out any defenses you can find. Everyone move!"

Mary, standing just in front of the Davids, began sprinting up the hill as fast as she could, the Maverick stumbling forward at an awkward jog. As the battle-lust hit her, her computer automatically corrected her oversight and flipped out her second gun, replacing the manipulator with the gun mount. She crested the hill just in time to be buzzed by four plasma globes that were screaming in around her knees, seeking out the Davids that had destroyed the jamming tower.

She watched as the valley quickly filled with the green and blue of the ARM units of Adriata. It was literally jammed with solar collectors, with only thin avenues between them that were quickly becoming clogged. As they realized an attack was on, the collectors compressed, turtle-like, to expose the armored underside of their panels and therefore take less damage. The ARM units darted quickly into the space this cleared up.

To either side of her, both squads were streaming out onto the battlefield. The clumsy Zeuses, towering over the other units, flipped out their lightning guns and tried to close the range between themselves and the defenses as quickly as possible. Most other units, much quicker, were moving in and trying to avoid fire from the Pulverizers. Jethros hung back and lined the entrance to the valley, pummeling the missile towers at long range. Mary watched as the supports of a tower buckled, toppling it onto a nearby solar panel.

She was rewarded with a direct hit at the base of a Punisher's dual cannons after a few rounds of fire, and she watched as it tried to retaliate, plasma dribbling out uselessly to burn through its armor and into the ground. She continued forward down the hill, giving the Davids the command to continue fighting.

Three Peewees dissolved as a plasma globe barreled through them, the ground hardly stopping its progress. Mary's memcomposite muscles twitched to keep her guns steady as she fired off a pair of plasma shots, missing her mark on a Punisher.

Suddenly six Vipers popped from the ground, one tossing an unlucky Peewee into the air as the gun's doors opened. Two of the Vipers happened to be right next to where the pairs of Zeuses had reached in their run towards the Punisher batteries, and it was a quick task as the menacing lightning guns ripped the air, scorching and destroying the Vipers.

Hammers swung to destroy the Vipers as they were picking apart the weaker Jethros and Peewees. A hail of missiles from the two-stage Davids rained onto one of the Punishers, weakly tearing at its armored base. Stumpies, which had been bombarding the Punishers since entering the valley, were directly underneath, and were punching shells straight through the armor of the Punishers to send explosions rattling around in their insides. One Punisher exploded, ripping apart three Stumpies right next to it, and the other plasma battery simply sank into the ground with a groan as its plasma tanks slowly leaked out, their containment field failed.

The last few Vipers and Pulverizers were destroyed easily and they began sorting out the wounded, finding medi-lathes for them. Mary finally had time to stop and think over the situation. An entire valley full of solar collectors, plenty of defenses. But more defenses than simply fifty solar collectors would warrant. What was going on? Mary headed to the heart of the defenses, the battery of four Punishers, while idly holstering her plasma guns and flipping out the Maverick's hands with a thought. She walked past a few ruined Stumpies, checking quickly with visuals and readouts that there was nothing left in them alive before moving on. She reached the gutted carcass of the Punisher whose plasma tanks had failed and melted inward.

Climbing the side, she looked down, and immediately gave one of the Peepers a mental tap on the shoulder. Waving her arm towards the pinking sky, where dusk was rapidly approaching, she said, "Back to base. Get Maritius. Quickly."

Mary snapped open her communicator and ordered a tightbeam to all troops. The suits automatically relayed to any other troops in range, rapidly disseminating orders to everyone in range. "Maverick over here with me. Four Zeuses, set up around the Punisher batteries. I want Peewees in every entrance to the valley and Hammers guarding those entrances. All anti-air in tight groups of five, Jeffies on full patrol, and Peepers, get down here and do a close ground sweep, with radar on full. Markies, I want you to walk the ridge, with two Jethros and four Peewees each. Davids, lose your escort squad and hang out with the Zeuses."

There was a satisfying rumble as the troops all tottered and rolled into position, the subordinates arranging the specific assignments of individuals. Mary was ready as soon as the other Maverick, piloted by a man named Chip, was in position. "One gun out, one manipulator out. We might be climbing. Let's go."

She helped hoist Chip's Maverick up to the lip of the hole pointed down into the smooth-sided crater the plasma had burned. The bottom of it, a hole twenty feet across, opened into a larger cavern. The floor was visible was visible one hundred feet below. With clenched teeth, Mary took a step into the crater, slipped, slid through the hole, and landed with a sharp thud on the floor of the cavern. She rolled out of the way, ignoring a pain in her hip, as Chip's Maverick came barreling in on top of her.

As she stood pain lanced through her hip. She glanced down quickly just to confirm that it was the suit's servos and not her own flesh and blood that had taken the damage. Sensors confirmed that a mechanical fixture was broken and internal systems were attempting to compensate. She could still walk, though, and she sharply commanded her computer to stop transmitting the leg pain.

With head and wrist lamps lit, the two Mavericks looked around the cavern. Its walls were smooth, obviously dug, and patched in some places with metal. A few mechanical parts littered the floor, but it was mainly empty. A small stream trickled through one end, and two tunnels, each wide enough for a Maverick to crawl through, ended on the other side. Mary knew enough of the situation to know it was above her pay grade.

"Zeus 1, you read?" Mary asked.

"Roger."

"Get a Marky over here."

"Roger." Mary stood still, waiting for the Marky to arrive. It called down on the radio when it finally arrived.

"Tell me what you can see down here," Mary ordered.

"Dunno, lot of interference from this Punisher I'm standing on, but I'll see what I can do."

"Have the Zeuses clean it away when you're done here."

After a short wait during which Mary could feel the friendly radar sweeping over here, the Marky answered.

"Definitely metal deposits, but a few things down there that look like structures, too; far too regular and dense to be just a deposit. Two in the walls down on the end opposite the stream, and more farther down. Apart from that, there's some sort of shielding, because I'm getting nothing at all past one hundred feet down, not even scrap metal."

"Thanks. Dismissed, back to patrol, but come back when the Punisher's cleared away."

Mary looked over to the other Maverick, then moved tentatively towards the two tunnels. Between the tunnels was a thick patch of Core metal over the wall, and Mary suspected it must house whatever the structure was the Marky had found. She edged toward it, both guns out and pointed. Sure enough, a Viper set laterally into the wall unfolded menacingly and began firing. Four solid shots hit the Maverick's midsection before twin blasts from both Chip and Mary ruptured the supports of the Viper and it dropped to the ground. The fire caused two more to deploy, however, one from another wall and one from the ceiling. Mary took a step to dodge and felt the Maverick collapse under her. From her back she unloaded shot after shot into the Viper above her and barely managed to roll the suit over as the debris fell from the roof. One large piece hit the Maverick's back but didn't pierce any armor. When she next looked up, Chip had finished off the other Viper and all was momentarily quiet.

She propped her suit up on one arm and looked at Chip.

"Status?"

"Seein' spots from a near miss, and my arm's a bit more liquid than it used to be." The Maverick's left arm had melted down to the internals, but seemed to be functioning fine.

"Everyone okay down there?" radioed one of the guards around the mouth of the hole.

"Just fine!" Mary answered back. She tightbeamed a further comment to Chip. "Not really. I'm pretty sure my leg's shot. I think we stay here. Maritius should be inbound by now."


	6. The Core of Humanity

It had been a nervous hour for Major Mary Jennings. She was stuck in a cavern which was clearly constructed by the Core, having just destroyed a few base defenses and clearly alerted the enemy to her presence. Her K-Bot was immobilized and she had only a single unit for support. The other units in her command were too small or too bulky to likely survive the 100-foot fall into the cavern, and there was no other obvious entrance. She had fought down the temptation to ask for status updates every thirty seconds by restricting her communications to tightbeam and transmitting everything through the other Maverick in the hole with her.

She finally breathed calmly again when a relayed transmission from one of the Marky radar bots announced two Atlas radar signatures coming in with a full flight of ten Freedom Fighters escorting them. The valley was in darkness, with the last light of a blazing sunset just dying on the horizon, but all Mary could see was a black sky straight up out of the hole she was in. The units above were patrolling with headlights on, and Maritius thought momentarily about the paradoxical beauty of so many tiny machines of war playing tiny lights over the scene before he dropped in closer and the toy-like effect was lost. A quick transmission told the Atlas pilots to set down in a cleared space near the head of the valley, and Maritius was soon peering down into the hole after Mary.

"So, what have you found here?" he called down with a chuckle.

"Dunno," Mary answered. "Could be a mining facility, but a few Vipers got to us before we had a chance to go any further."

"Dobson's here with me, he heard from the Peeper that there might be something he'd be interested in."

"Could be. You coming down?"

"Two secs." Maritius swept his eyes over his console once to make sure he approved of the patrol routes - though he doubted he'd find anything amiss - then authorized the Atlas pilots to shut down if they wanted. One was a natural clone and popped his hatch, perching on the front edge of the cockpit. The Freedom Fighters broke off their escort and fell into a patrol pattern with the Peepers.

Maritius looked around for a solid spot on the cleared ground around the small crater and finally found one he was satisfied with, 'lathing himself an anchor for his rappelling line as he'd done in his first moments on Adriata. Jack Dobson, in his Advanced Construction , did the same, 'lathing a cord from each arm. Dobson's construction unit did not have the reflexes necessary for battle, and was definitely not built for climbing. He walked it gingerly backwards toward the edge of the crater as Maritius literally leapt into the hole and brought himself short with a jerk on the 'rope' of nanobots. Once he detached the anchor and reclaimed the nanobots, he simply reached up and plucked his adviser out of the air and put him on the ground.

"You didn't mention you got beat up," Maritius said with a slightly accusatory tone. Mary managed to get a shrug out of her Maverick. Maritius clucked like a mother as he sent the wave of nanobots over the gunslinging K-bot. "Sheared the primary hip actuator in half. Nice job, slick."

"Hey, it was a joint effort. Me, the hundred foot fall, and three Vipers," Mary answered. "I can't take all the credit."

"So modest," Dobson smirked. He was just putting the finishing touches on a new slab of armor on the other Maverick's upper arm.

Maritius finished up with the repairs and pulled Mary's Maverick to its feet. He turned to the tunnels. "So, do we know what's down there?" Maritius asked, already knowing the answer.

"The Marky was jammed at a hundred feet, just under where we are."

"Well, let's go." Maritius walked to the tunnels and dropped to his hands and knees. He shimmied into the small space - small, that is, for his Command Suit - and was thankful for perhaps the hundredth time since Gating that he had received the education he had. Learning to crawl without using arms was definitely not a standard procedure in a Commander's training manual. But he'd done it for weeks, until he got it right, under the watchful eye of the Second Commander. And then he'd been put in training situations where it was essential that he know and use the skill or else he would die or fail the mission. He inched his way forward with his arms stretched out in front. Chip, Dobson, and finally Mary came behind.

Mary had a brief moment of panic as she heard first heavy breathing, and then the unmistakable sound of a fight, while she was still stuck on her belly in the middle of the tunnel. "No problems. Proceed," Maritius said after a moment. She soon passed a scorched hole where another Viper had been ripped from the wall by Maritius. By the look of it, he'd resorted to brute force in the small tunnel. They continued a short distance until, instead of the bottom's of Dobson's K-bot's feet, Mary could see an open space and the feet and ankles of the other suits.

Maritius stood, staring blankly at the scene in front of him. He was at one end of a huge cavern, lit intermittently by small towers topped with searchlights. He couldn't tell whether the lights went out in the distance, or the space was simply so large that he couldn't see to the end of it. He was standing on a thick ledge at one end of the cavern which thinned out but persisted along both sides of the space. The second tunnel apparently mirrored the one he had taken, and came out in the same spot. A few paces of the Command Suit in front of him was a ledge. A portion of the ledge had been machined and a large platform was built into it. From the look of the supports on all sides and the geared mechanisms, this was an elevator to a deeper portion of the complex. He stepped toward the edge and peered over.

The base of the cavern was at least a thousand feet away, probably more. Lining the cavern, from top to bottom, were metal scaffolds on which worked humanoid K-bots, drilling with handheld equipment or maintaining larger mining rigs. Conveyors ran along the inner edge of the scaffolds and a complex dance of raw stone, ore, and equipment moved along the conveyors and was sorted, shunted, and shuffled into position. At the base of the cavern a few hundred feet from the edge was a processing plant; the destination for the raw ore of this portion of the mine. It glowed and sparked with the heat and light of the purification processes. A quarter mile down the cavern was another plant, another, then another. Metal storage bins rose two or three hundred feet from the floor of the cavern. In some places storage units were stacked on top of each other to form a pillar from floor to ceiling, providing a structural support to replace the removed metal. The K-bots were entirely 'civilian' and didn't even recognize the presence of outsiders, being too involved in their work.

Maritius was the first to snap out of the reverie, moving with the excitement of a young boy with a new toy. "Computer. Central computer. Gotta find the central unit." He slid onto the platform and turned his lathe towards the controls, using nanobots to interpret and capture the mechanism. He was careful not to disrupt any signals into or out of the elevator's tiny brain, in case he might tip off the central computer to an intruder's presence. As if the battle hadn't already, he thought. But capture might trigger explosives or any number of other traps. He began descending as the other ARM units scrambled onto the platform.

After determining the location of the central computer, he reverse-programmed a few of the code sequences of the small elevator computer and deduced what friend-or-foe codes the unit would recognize, and then reconfigured his suit and those around him to broadcast a modified Core code. It appeared to work, because the next Viper unit - while it deployed - didn't fire on them.

A short crawl through another tunnel brought Maritius into the central control room for the huge mine, and it was then that sensors registered him for what he truly was. The shape of the ARM commander was the first thing Core Patterns were taught to hate in their conditioning, and the Pattern left in this plant was no exception. Sirens warbled as the Mavericks brought their guns up, ready to face whatever foe would be coming.

Maritius leapt into action, 'lathing the unit in the center of the room and attempting to hack into its security systems electronically. The first thing he noticed was the activated self-destruct matrix. The central block of fusion plants for the mine processors were slowly shedding their secondary coolant, which would in turn overload the primary coolant pumps and lock up the entire system. The next step would be the mine complex, along with Maritius, all the Arm forces, and the majority of the valley above, disappearing as a new sun blinked into existence for a moment. He wasted precious seconds trying to turn off the self-destruct matrix but eventually gave up. It would take nearly two minutes for the fusion plants to go nova, but he had the physical upper hand in the match. He turned to fighting with the Pattern for its own processor power.

The nanobots from his command suit flowed over the blocks of computing systems. The environment was perfect for them; abundant energy, heat, and metal in easily digestible bits. Through them, Maritius quickly cut the Pattern off from non-essential systems, essentially severing its limbs with ruthless precision. He cut the Pattern off from a number of memory storage modules and secondary processing units, then observed in which direction the Pattern retreated. He soon had it corralled into a small chunk of volatile memory, and he surrounded the Pattern with a shell of nanobots programmed to spoof and reverse any friend-or-foe decisions coming out of the Pattern, then reconnected it with select portions of its secondary programs. The Pattern surged out from its pen and began trying to reclaim lost ground, and didn't notice for a few moments that all of its thinking with regard to enemies was somehow getting twisted around. In the time it took to rig a counter-spoof, Maritius had located the communications relay to the fusion plant and used more nanobots to cut it off from all control but his own.

Maritius re-doubled the attack on the Pattern and snapped a few commands to Dobson to sever specific communications connections. Maritius cut all energy from the Pattern for just a moment - not long enough to wipe it, but just long enough to disorient it. In those moments he drew out a bit of the Pattern's core programming and used it as a framework to build a command reversing the self-destruct program. Using his controlled communications relay he sent the command to the fusion plants, while at the same moment cutting the self-destruct matrix from the system as a whole. The self-destruct sequence kept running, isolated from everything else on the system. The plants reversed the command and the secondary coolant began, again, to flow. Maritius reduced the Pattern's physical connections to a minimum of physical memory, one single power source, and plenty of processing power. In essence, he gave the Pattern plenty to think with, but nothing to think about.

Maritius slumped back into his seat for a moment and breathed easier. He glanced around the room - bank after bank of storage and processing, clearly enough for far more than one Pattern. Though he had to squat in his Command Suit, it was still a large room, and it was full of computing hardware. Billions and billions of bytes were flowing around every second, but the mine itself seemed almost deserted. He shrugged, then checked in with Dobson. Dobson checked the systems for a moment, then gave the thumbs-up; the Pattern was safely contained. Maritius he gave the Pattern access to one tightbeam communications array in the corner of the room. It immediately sent a message.

"A worthy opponent," it said.

"Thank you. May I have the honor?"

"I am Director-016."

"Maritius."

A pause. "At this point, I have been trained to ask for a list of your demands for my safe return and then transmit your ransom to Central Consciousness. I regret to inform you this is not possible, as I am not in contact with Central Consciousness."

"How long have you been out of contact?" Maritius asked, surprised. He wouldn't have expected any Pattern to be out of contact with the CC, let alone one powering such a resource farm as this one.

"Over eight Standard years, sir."

"What have you been doing with these resources?" Maritius doubted he would get an answer, but he figured he'd push until he found a limit in his questioning.

"After losing contact, I focused on filling my reserve capacity for such time as the mine's resources would again be needed. Once that was complete, I reduced the mine to 30% production capacity and began building the defenses you encountered above. I also built the number of solar collectors to power those defenses. Once this was complete, I reduced the mine to 10% capacity. Then all function was suspended save routine maintenance."

Maritius took in this information for a moment. "If the complex had greater capacity, why only build the defenses above? Why not continue?"

"They were all I knew to build," DIR-016 said. It sounded almost . . . wistful. "The repair K-bots I have in this complex were programmed to build only those, though they have the ability to build more productive systems. I have tried designing units, but there are certain, ah . . . safeguards against my successfully completing a design." Maritius waited to let him finish. It took a long time, but it seemed that after eight years alone even an electronic Pattern couldn't resist speaking to another sentient being. "I seem to have the fatal character flaw of forgetting to outfit my designs with a power unit." The Pattern rippled an electronic laugh. "I know intellectually that my designs must be powered, of course, and I check over each one until only milliseconds before they are executed or saved, but regardless; somewhere in the process I always remove the power plant I design. I am built with boundaries, you see."

"So, that's what the plant has been doing," Maritius said. "What have you been doing?" Maritius doubted he'd have this question answered. But then again, he had never heard of a Pattern like this, in a situation such as this. And he had studied literally thousands of Consciousness Patterns captured from the Core.

"Thinking, sir," it responded flatly.

"About . . ?"

"My purpose, sir. And what ARM units are truly like. And if the Core can truly call their individuals sentient any longer. And . . ." DIR-016 paused. "I am sorry. My philosophical ruminations must bore you, and even if they don't, they are mine. I have come to conclude that the products of our minds are the only things that can make us truly individual."

"Director-016," Maritius said respectfully, "I regret to inform you that I must impose yet another boundary on you, and leave you partitioned on this machine. I see that it will continue to function as intended without intervention from you for the time being, and therefore plan on keeping it running and using its resources. If I understand you correctly, as I hope I do, I think that it would be in your best interests not to try and disrupt this, or to try and leave the boundaries I'm imposing. Let's call it a show of goodwill. I hope I will be able to return here in a few weeks to find that you have extended goodwill towards me, and that we may speak more then, of many things."

"I look forward to it, sir, and I hope as well that you will see a show of goodwill on your return." With that, DIR-016 turned inward, cutting off the transmission.

Maritius looked up and found the others milling around the control room, with Dobson correcting a few minor errors in the nanobots' reprogramming. With a final command, Dobson repackaged the coordinates of the resource teleporters to route through the main facilities in Adriata city. Maritius saw Dobson's jaw drop through the clear faceplate of the K-bot.

"What?"

"Our metal storage capacity, Maritius. I'll tell you some other time when you can handle the shock."

Maritius chuckled. "I've just had a nice chat with the Pattern that runs this place. He's been cut off from the CC for eight years, and he's been doing a lot of thinking. Might actually be able to convert him."

Mary snorted over the comm system, obviously unbelieving. "That'll be the day."

"Just you wait," Maritius answered softly, almost to himself.

******

Six days later, Maritius and his command squad were back in Adriata City for the launch of their first fusion reactor. When Jack Dobson clambered out of the structure and declared the reactor ready for a test run he was three minutes ahead of schedule. "Let 'er rip," Maritius said, standing tall in his command suit, waiting for the readouts on the reactor's activity. Everyone who wasn't guarding the ARM's new mine to the north had turned out, some in their units if they were on duty, others on foot.

Dobson, standing in his A.C.K-bot, fired a last burst of nanobots with the order to activate the plant and stepped back, looking up. A glow started in the base of the plant and could be seen to climb up through thin windows set in both of the large towers, finally reaching the top. The reactor settled into a gentle hum and was successfully on-line.

A cheer went up from the gathered crowd and Maritius quickly announced another feast, this one outside in the sun, before the crowd dispersed. Both he and Dobson, climbing out of their suits, reached the ground at the same time.

"Jack, gotta talk to you," Maritius said.

Dobson stopped dead and stared, cocking his head to one side. "What's with the hair?"

Maritius looked back in confusion, then reached a tentative hand up to his head where he felt the small mass of spikes. He grinned as he remembered what he'd done. "Oh, I spiked it and dyed it blue. Like it?" Dobson didn't answer, but took on the look of a disapproving parent. "Well, I _am _fifteen after all. I'm allowed some small rebellions. Besides, I could haul you up on charges of insubordination."

"Like what?"

"Hmm . . . cowardice in the face of a teenager?"

Dobson shook his head. "Kids. So, what did you want?"

"Jack, you said that our storage is full, all sorts of metals from that mine?" Jack nodded. "And we're cranking out plenty of power now, right?" Jack nodded again. "Bad. I don't want either of those full."

"What?"

"Look, something's funny. The Core obviously haven't just given up on this planet, but something strange is going on, and I want to be ready when we get attacked. And if we've got all these resources lying around, well, that doesn't prove that we've got enough resources, it just proves we're aren't doing anything with them. I want more defenses. Loads more. But for now, I guess we just need more building power. I don't like having just one advanced lab around."

"I hear you. You want to follow the phase 2 OBP?"

"No, not really. It didn't take that new mine into account. Tell you what, you feed the new info into the computer, get the new OBP, and modify it however you want. You get first crack at the changes because you'll overindulge in the building capacity, like you always do," Dobson gave a crooked smile, "and if we've got the breathing room now, seems to make sense to get our production capacity up to speed. I'll do any touch-ups as I see fit, then I'll turn it over to the strategy side of the war council and let them get some defenses put in, too. But I want our resources pushed to the limit for two weeks straight, that's how much building I want going on here. You got that?"

"Yessir. Two weeks, non-stop. You better thaw out s'more construction pilots then."

"We haven't thawed any standard clones yet. You got anything against 'em?"

"No sir, my father was a standard clone."

It was Maritius' turn to cock his head to one side. "Uh, not 'natural' clone. 'Standard' clone?"

"Yup."

"Like, the ones that live in vehicles, that kinda standard clone?"

Dobson grinned. "Don't get your brain in a bunch. It's like this; my mother and father were in love, but then my father got killed. Well, not my father. The original, baby-born human with his DNA. They used his last DNA backup to make a standard clone. My mother was broken up about it for a bit, naturally, cause the man she loved had died. But at some point she got introduced to my father. And of course she knew it wasn't him, exactly, not the man she'd loved before. But she got to talking to him, he was a Flash driver, and fell in love with him all over again. The new him. Whatever. They did a little operation to get the gametes out of him, but after a standard fertilization, I came out. My dad eventually retired, sorta. 'He' actually was floating in a cryo tank in a back room of our house, but he just talked and walked through his android, and my mom said it was almost like having the old one around."

"So you were a natural birth?"

"That's right."

"Crazy stuff. Crazy, crazy . . . anyway, let me know with that plan, soon as you can. And hey," Maritius threw his arm up around Jack's shoulders, "just for that story, you deserve a drink."

"Some cultures might say you're too young to drink," Jack answered with a smile.

"Yeah, some might say you're too insubordinate to drink, but so what? I make the laws around here. C'mon, let's go!"

*******

Maritius found himself looking down the barrel of an Intimidator, trying to gauge whether the glow at its base was constant or only when it was powering for a shot. He decided not to risk it and ducked, crouching to keep his back against the base of the plasma cannon and look out over the battlefield.

He looked back at his troops; four Bulldog tanks all that were left of the twenty he'd brought in. He turned back to the the direction of his advance. He sighted a Goliath down his D-gun and fired. The Intimidator above him erupted simultaneously and sent a thick globe of plasma, eerily lighting its own path through the night, streaking towards a Bulldog. Both tanks, one ARM, one Core, disappeared under the huge blasts of energy.

Leaping up, Maritius rolled an antimatter grenade down the barrel of the plasma cannon, then dropped back to the ground. He began running hard up the hill with the Bulldogs powering after him. He crested the hill, spotting a huge troop of assorted K-bots, a few Punishers, GAAT guns, and the Buzzsaw that was his target, the entire valley glowing with the light of the enemy forces and a few light towers. A harsh glow played over them as plasma spouted into the sky from the wrecked Intimidator behind Maritius.

He watched as a Bulldog next to him was hit with a Gauss round from the small valley below. With his D-gun aimed at the tallest K-bots he could see, he filled the palm of his left hand with a mass of nanobots. He sized up the Bulldog tank, trying to guess its injuries since he didn't have time for a diagnostic, then threw the mass of nanobots onto a smoking wreckage just in front of the ARM tank. The wreckage would provide both the heat and the metal necessary for the nanobots to replicate, and they would (he hoped) latch onto the Bulldog as it rolled by. He fired his D-gun again, watching as a line was plowed through metal and dirt in the path of his gun blast. Just to make sure, he filled his palm again and threw the nanobots straight at the tank, where they hit like a ball of wet paper and magnetically stuck before crawling into position to begin repairs.

The Punishers were firing as quickly as they could as he stormed down the hill amid a hail of laser fire and rockets. Maritius avoided the plasma globes easily; his quickened reflexes and processor made dodging the slow shots an easy task.

But the damage was mounting. Two more Bulldogs disintegrated under the fire, leaving not even wreckage behind, and the one he'd repaired was the last one left on its tracks. Its final shot destroyed a Punisher, but it soon disappeared under the fire as a Dominator's rocket landed on it with a crushing explosion.

Maritius' stomach tightened into a knot of fear as the last of his armour give way. He felt his backpack's containment field breaking down as weapons pounded into him. The antimatter explosion began with aching slowness, and he felt through his heightened interface as every molecule of his fragile body was ripped apart, disappearing in a thunderclap of uncontainable energy and unimaginable pain.

Maritius felt his face squeezed shut like a clamp, a frozen mask of pain. He slowly released his jaw and peeled his eyeballs open, and he swore they creaked as they moved. "Glrrrgl," he stated through pain-clenched teeth. "OW! That hurts so damn much."

"Well, that's why most people play the simulators with pain blockers on," he heard Ryan Storough's mellow voice with a smile in it.

"Yeah, but then you take stupid chances because it doesn't feel real," Maritius responded, reaching back for the neural interface jack and sitting up from the couch in his private bedroom.

"Stupid chances?" Storough said, mock-offended. "Me?"

"Oh, c'mon. Would you really have stormed that nuke silo if you hadn't known you could just restart the game?"

"Probably not. Besides, it was an anti -nuke silo."

"Yeah, I meant to ask you about that. Did you mean to attack a purely defensive weapon?"

"You'd be surprised how similar a nuke site and an ABM site look."

"Yeah, maybe you need an enemy recognition refresher. You need to brush up on your structures."

"Yessir," Storough said jokingly.

"See you tomorrow? Maybe I'll take out the Buzzsaw without the help of a backpack reaction next time."

"Sure thing."

Maritius walked outside and straight into his commander suit. He had some thinking to do.

Maritius marched to the top of Gate Hill and sat down in his command suit, leaning it against one of the massive supports of the inactive Galactic Gate. He stared out over the newly-expanded base with a vague sense of unease. The edge nearest the foothills and the pass to the northeast was a carpet of heavy industrial facilities - advanced factories for K-bots and vehicles, and the defenses to go with them. The top of the ridge there had four long-range Big Bertha heavy cannons. The first few buildings of the base had been reclaimed and in there place was a thick collection of defensive structures and open, public spaces - parks, an amphitheater, playing fields. Beneath them were new living quarters, recreation and medical facilities, command and control, administrative centers, and the new nursery - pretty empty for the moment, but not for long, he hoped.

They had plenty of excess production capacity, the fourth fusion reactor had come online, and there was even a roadway being built at the crawling pace of a construction vehicle toward the mine complex to the northeast. Research facilities were up next to make use of all that excess power. Three repair hangars had been built and were busy upgrading the turrets of all the currently-produced Flash tanks. Dobson had changed a design for the turret's gearbox to increase their slew speed.

Maritius had thought that maybe he wasn't using enough of his brain, so he went to Dobson to get a primer in vehicle design and try to drown his disillusionment with work. He'd designed an Underground Construction Vehicle, which Dobson was looking over before programming it into the advanced vehicle plant. Next he tried an upgraded Peeper, but a scout plane isn't much of a challenge. After increasing the engine size and upgrading the control surfaces, he stuck back in the old systems for control and camera work. Maritius didn't really feel like he'd accomplished anything revolutionary. Ah well, he thought, there's always the simulators.

He was also worried. His brain wasn't working as well - or maybe as randomly - as he would have hoped. The main weapon in any war was knowledge, and the great problem with the endless cloning and copying of the Arm strategists was that the intellectual gene pool began to run dry. Would forty copies of a famous scientist produce forty new discoveries? There was a chance that none of them would come up with anything revolutionary besides the first. Research and development was not a simple linear process, after all. Not a plodding forward along a highway labeled "Progress." This was why the nursery was so important; only brand new humans could assure the ARM's success. New combinations and mixtures and breeds of people. Maritius was worried that his designs were drying up, and while everyone was invited to try designing (the computer's aid made it a simple task), few people seemed to want to. Most people lost interest after designing a few wildly outlandish designs - a cannon that shot Peewees, or a giant land spider, for example.

Maritius tipped forward to stand, but froze halfway out of his crouch, the massive commander squatting at the base of the Gate. But he knew someone who would like to design units. Units _with _power plants.


	7. Separate Ways

DIR-016 was waiting for him when Maritius returned. Through the cameras and sensors that it was still allowed in the control room, the Core Pattern watched the Commander crawl into the cramped room and squat on the floor.

"Greetings, Commander Maritius."

"Greetings, Director-016."

"I was beginning to think you might not return. And here I am with all this goodwill . . ." Maritius had to think back to his earlier conversation with the Pattern to recognize the reference. Was that sarcasm?

"Well, we've been busy utilizing the resources you so generously gave to us."

"I hardly gave them. I was captured," the Pattern responded, not petulant, but correcting.

"True. But . . . I see from the logs here that you've been very faithful to our arrangement."

"That I have, Commander."

"Am I right in my assumption that you would join the ARM?"

The Pattern paused for a long, long time. For over five minutes, Maritius heard nothing but the distant whine of the mine's machinery and his own breath within the cockpit. "What would be expected of me?"

"Well." It was Maritius' turn to pause. He thought for a moment, never having really considered where an ex-Core Pattern would fit into the standard structure of the ARM military. "First of all, there are no 'civilians' on Adriata. If I were to offer you a life with the ARM faction, it would be in a military capacity. Everyone on this planet is involved in the struggle, and the same would be expected of you." Maritius paused again, and took a sip of water. His mouth was strangely dry. "That being said, not all jobs within the ARM hierarchy involve combat. Given your experience as a Director of this facility, you could stay here. Or we could, as I had planned, leave the computer to run it. We will be making some adjustments and bringing in at least a small contingent of humans to oversee it. If you choose to leave here, there would undoubtedly be jobs for you back at our base. We assign tasks to those who would most enjoy them, or who are most skilled at them. We would see where your skills lie, and how we can use them."

"Would I be human?"

Maritius considered the question. "That is clearly a larger question than I can answer. But, if we change the question to 'would I be equal to a human?' then I can say, with some reservations, yes. We have the technology to take one of our brainwave sets and transfer it into a human body. I doubt this would work with a Consciousness Pattern. The complexity of a brainwave set that is still in motion would certainly be too much for the cloning computers. However," Maritius paused as an idea came to him, "we do have androids, human-like robots."

"Ah yes, for the use of your 'standard clones,' as you call them."

"Yes."

"It is true that they have no body beyond the unit they inhabit?"

"Not entirely. They have a body, though its growth is stunted, and is kept alive inside the unit they inhabit. In some ways their vehicle is a shell for their body, and their body is simply a shell for their mind. We provide androids to these clones so that they can move among us and feel free to mingle with us, and it is much easier as an android than, say, a Stumpy tank."

"And these androids use what as . . . motivation? As intelligence?"

"They receive commands through the transmission hardware of the unit. They are connected in this way to the standard clone through the communications hardware of their vehicle. We could modify the relay between the signal hardware and the body, which should be easy enough. If your processor needs are modest enough that they can be fit on the hardware which would fit inside the android's skull - or other parts of the body, then you would be fully autonomous, in a standard android."

"But my power needs . . ." DIR-016 trailed off.

"A simple resource nanolathe, like the ones in most units, could give you all the power you need. A few structurally reinforced bones could be hollowed out as batteries in the event of an emergency. In fact, you could take a hand in the design of the unit, as you would know most of what it requires."

"This sounds very acceptable. In fact, much more than acceptable. I believe this will make me very happy." Maritius thought he could hear the Pattern smile. "Thank you, Commander."

"You're welcome."

"May I ask for a show of goodwill on your part?"

"Yes," Maritius answered, curious.

"Could I see you? Not your command suit, but you?"

Maritius froze. It could be a trick. It would be a very good trick. Get him out of the suit and murder him. A tightbeam laser modified to lethal wavelengths. Poison gas in the computer room's air. A massive short, frying everything within the room. But this Pattern seemed so human. So alive. So sincere. Maritius reached out a hand and fired a trickle of nanobots onto the mainframe. He looked through the data structures - which he'd studied some since their last battle - and checked for any leaks in the walls of the 'prison' where the Pattern had been contained. There were none. He then sent nanobots into the hardware the Pattern was currently inhabiting; an extremely offensive gesture in Core culture which the Pattern accepted without complaint. He did, however, notice a small, familiar program which was attached to the Pattern.

"Is that the self-destruct sequence from our last meeting?" he asked, more curious than concerned.

The Pattern answered a bit sheepishly. "Yes, sir. Once you severed it from its trigger, it became nothing more . . . well, nothing but a clock, really."

Maritius accessed it momentarily. The Pattern was correct that it no longer had a 'trigger' attached to it. And the point was moot as well, it had long since run past 0:00:00 on the counter and had begun, instead, counting into the negatives. It was at negative thirteen days, eight hours, seventeen minutes, and an accurate count down to the millisecond from the moment when the mine complex would have exploded. "Why?"

The Pattern answered, "It is counting the time from an important moment in my existence. However long that continues to be. I suppose you would say it is nostalgic to me."

Maritius made up his mind. He cracked the hatch of his crouching command suit and walked to the middle of the room, stretching his arms out in front of the main bank of computer terminals in the center. It struck him that the gesture was appropriate as either martyr or friend. After a few moments, Maritius got back into the command suit and jacked in.

"Thank you, Maritius."

"You're welcome," Maritius answered, noticing that the Pattern now called him by name, and not rank.

"May I ask you something else?"

"Certainly."

"Why is your hair blue? Is this normal for commanders?"

Maritius laughed deeply. "No, that isn't normal for anyone. And its status as abnormal is precisely why it is normal for teenagers. I'm still a youth, you could say. I'm only fifteen standard years old."

"I thought perhaps you were much older than the normal, and therefore smaller, but thought that you looked . . . well . . . fresher? Less weathered, perhaps, than others I have seen outside their suits."

"Yes, I'm certainly young for a human pilot. Very young for a commander. But I have been training as a commander for my entire life."

"May I ask one more question, please?"

Maritius leaned back into his seat. "Certainly."

"What is your stance on the submission of unit designs?"

Maritius chuckled. "We like them very much. Why, do you have some that you'd like to show us?"

"Just a few. Since a day two months after I lost contact with the Central Consciousness, I had estimated with 62% probability that I would eventually be discovered not by the Core but by ARM forces. Because of this, I have been preparing for the eventuality that I would need a bargaining chip in order to stay functional . . . alive, I suppose you would say. I have designed a number of units that capitalize on flaws and weaknesses in the Core units known to me."

Maritius glanced at the computer bank. "But you never mentioned your bargaining chip during our talks . . ."

"I did not feel that I needed it. And to 'bargain' with you would seem somewhat callous, I would say, when you have been so trusting. It would have cheapened your offer, for me to have thought to purchase what you were giving freely." The Pattern performed something akin to a cough to signal a change of topic; a quick clearing of the cache in the communications relay. "As I was saying, I have a number of unit designs, mainly changes to standard ARM designs. But of course, on the 38% chance that I came into contact with the Core Central Consciousness again, the designs are thickly encoded as routine data management traffic and hidden on some parts of the hard drive now inaccessible to me . . ." Maritius took a moment to lift the partition. "Ah, thank you. Yes, here they are. Of course, I may need some help with the power units . . ."

******

As Maritius looked out from his perch on the hill a few days later, he noticed that he felt considerably better. He couldn't attribute it all to the conversion of the Core Pattern, although that did make him feel good. Not simply the fact that he'd done it, but also the new Pattern, wandering around the base, looking at everything. He seemed genuinely _happy_. Maritius had hardly converted him at all, but given him his wish. His happiness was infectious; Maritius had seen others affected by it as well. And he was so child-like in his approach to it all. After a night in the bar with some of the pilots, he had set about trying to design a program which would mimic the effects of alcohol on his electronic system. So far he'd just succeeded in making himself stagger and slur his words, but the effect was at least similar.

A research lab was completed nearly one hundred feet underground, below the living quarters. A makeshift staff of volunteers who worked after-hours, away from their patrol duties, were conducting a few experiments into better laser focusing, but so far they'd spent most of their time burning the local fauna. The lab's nanolathes, which were programmable and highly sophisticated, were set to build ten of the kites that the Second Commander had designed, to be used in starting a new base farther west. He'd just sent out the first four new Peepers off the 'lathes, with twice the speed of the earlier scout craft, to look to the west, preferably to find water. And he didn't have long to wait until they returned.

Maritius was down in the compound when they did come back. Only two were airborne and both were still smoking from an attack. One had lost its VTOL engines and was coming in for a glide landing. Maritius and three other construction K-bots were hastily 'lathing an extension onto the advanced aircraft plant's short runway. Because all craft from the plant had VTOL technology the runway was something of a decoration, but it would have to be used now.

The first Peeper, with most of its engines still intact, flew in just ahead of the injured one and landed quickly. It landing gear hadn't deployed and so it settled gently onto one side. The second peeper came in low and fast over the trees, then darted upward at the last moment. It circled around and made another approach, and again turned away at the last second. Maritius kept 'lathing, beginning to build a small emergency net at the end of the runway that wouldn't be even close to long enough.

The Peeper circled twice more, each time dipping closer to the trees, until it finally dove sharply at the runway and leveled off, speeding along a few feet above the newly 'lathed surface. It had barely touched down, with sparks flying off its landing struts, when it reached the end of the runway and crashed straight through the hastily-made netting, spinning and bouncing to a stop a few feet past the end of the runway. Maritius and others, including two medical doctors in K-bot exoskeletons, ran over to the Peeper to pull the pilot from the craft. The other pilot, suffering from severe burns from an explosion in the cockpit, was already being treated and carried into the medical suites.

The pilot popped the hatch and managed to walk out of the aircraft herself, stumbling once she was on the ground. Maritius knelt, then opened his own hatch and clambered down his suit's bended knee to reach the ground.

"Steady, now," he said, holding the pilot up. The first medical K-bot had reached her, and the specialized diagnostic nanobots were boring painlessly through her skin to seek out her bloodstream.

After a few moments, the medtech pronounced "Looks good, sir," and stepped back.

"How do you feel?" Maritius asked.

"Little shaken up, that's all."

"What happened."

"Core base, on the coast. Plenty of air defenses, they chewed up the other two pretty quick. I spotted four or five Intimidators, and a couple of Doomsdays guarding some special entrances. A few shipyards were cranking out plenty of ships, too. But it seemed to be mainly air defense, that I could spot. Between the two of us, we got most of it on tape. If any of it's left," she said, woefully motioning back at her Peeper that two C.K-bots were 'lathing to silence one of the engines that was stuck running.

"I'll check over the tapes. You did well," Maritius said, his mind already leaping ahead strategically.

"Thanks. Can I go check on my wingmate?"

"Sure, sure. Yeah. Follow that med K-bot there, it'll probably take you to the right place." Maritius locked his command suit and put it to sleep, with orders to wake him in the event of any alarms. His mind darted into a conference room and he sat down, looking up at the screen where, with a rapid series of thoughts, he displayed all the information he needed.

Even as he watched the tapes of the Peepers' fly-overs, a list of possible attack strategies formed in his mind. He had three individual tapes, since one of the pilots had beamed over his tapes to another plane before he'd been shot down. The last hadn't successfully relayed any information, and so Maritius was left to guess about a small portion of the base. The list of attack strategies shrank as he examined each of the defenses, and continued to shrink, until finally, he was out of options entirely. Slowly he realized that not being able to penetrate the base was the least of their problems. They had encountered Core forces, and if those forces tracked found their location, they'd be stomped out. Quickly.

Mary Jennings, the ground specialist, and Ryan Storough, the tank specialist, both found their way into the conference room together and sat down at the virtual table. "Whatcha got, chief?" Storough asked.

Maritius looked up at him, the pressure already weighing down on him. He thought back to his boredom of recent weeks and inwardly laughed at himself. He had excitement, now, that was for sure. But he didn't want it. He shook his head sharply before focusing on Ryan. "I think we're screwed, honestly."

"Oh, c'mon now . . ." Mary began.

"No, really, I thought about it from a lot of angles, and this is what I've come up with." Mary fell silent, and Maritius continued. "The first thing we do is get up another ten or fifteen Hawks. We've gotta pad the air defense even more, and guarantee nothing gets through to get a look at our base, because there's nothing much here to see. If they find out this is all we've got, they'll launch a full-out assault and we're through. Right?"

"Sure," Storough agreed.

"So, in order for them to not come get us, we have to appear stronger than we really are. The first step is to keep them from seeing how strong we really are. That's the new Hawks. I've already got them 'lathing. The next step is to attack, quickly, like the next few days. And attack in such numbers that we seem stronger than we are."

"Right," Storough agreed again.

"The only trouble is, to get up a force that would be overwhelming to that," Maritius leaned onto the word, accenting it further by thrusting his arm at a screen displaying a single image of two flak guns, three Intimidators, and two batteries of three Punishers, not to mention various ground troops, "we'd have to be building here for at least a month. And by that time, reinforcements will have gotten there and we won't even be able to pretend to be invincible."

"We need to disappear, and soon, sir," Mary said. "Jammers immediately, so that we can't be targeted on radar. And I suggest we send in three more flights of Peepers, automated if you'd like, all from the south. Throw them off, make them think that our first sortie was a feint from a direction other than that of our base."

"Right, right, good thinking. You guys have got to help me out, keep me focused on the here and now. I'm getting ahead of myself." Maritius gave the order for six Eraser jamming K-bots, then sent a quick message to DIR-016, asking him if he could design a jamming tower. An easy enough task, since it mainly involved taking the legs off of an Eraser K-bot. Mark Ryu entered the room in the silence just after Maritius gave the orders.

"So, you're saying we can't go in the air against them?" Storough asked.

"Not a chance," Maritius responded.

"Well, I haven't had a chance to review the tapes yet," Ryu protested.

"Not a chance, Mark. There's no way you can go in against those kinds of air defenses. A strategic strike would be impossible, and we can't mount an overwhelming force. Even if we did, the casualties would be far too high. There's no way I'm going to allow it." Ryu nodded.

"So we have to go in on the ground," Storough stated. Dobson wandered in, recently alerted to the news, and sat watching as the military talk flew past him. He put in his two cents when their talk moved onto ground where he was more comfortable and knowledgeable, but he let the strategic conversation roam without him.

". . . won't work either. Too many large guns. We might be able to simply subdivide them to death, with enough small, quick units, but we'd need larger units to fend off the Core ground troops. But they'd get cut up by the defenses first, so then we'd . . ." Maritius slowly trailed off. "I just don't know what we're gonna do."

Mary stopped, peering at the screen for a moment. "We go in, we take out the air defenses. Then we draw out the ground troops. Then we go in the air and take out the rest of it."

"What about the ships?" Maritius asked.

"A few on-shore plasma cannons once we get the area locked down, that should take care of any ships. Even Warlords can't outreach a Bertha."

"But are we going to have time to put up a Bertha?"

"Look, this is all well and good, but I'm still worried about the first two parts of our little plan," Storough interrupted. "How do we take out the air defenses and bring out the ground troops in two separate phases?"

Maritius held up a hand before the meeting got out of control. "Let's think basics here. We want to take out the air defenses without getting into a pitched battle. So we bombard them from long range, stay jammed, and keep moving, right?"

Everyone nodded, but Mary spoke up. "With those defenses, what can we bombard from that range with?"

Maritius held up a hand. "Merls."

Storough answered. "Too slow, don't hit hard enough, take too long to reload. Maybe if we increased the warhead . . ."

"No time for fancy redesigns now. We've got to throw this together in a few days. How 'bout Lugers?"

"Even slower, and even less accurate. We can't rely on solely artillery to do what we need without forward spotting, and we've got to assume they wont let us put Peepers over their base like we did at the mine."

"What else do we have that hits at a distance?"

"The new Davids?" Ryu asked.

"Nope. Shorter range than anything else, and you'd need a lot of them. There's no way we could jam enough of them to make it worthwhile."

"Look, we just need to look at this thing from an outside perspective."

A smile slowly spread across Maritius' face. "I know just the person for that." With a thought, he sent out a message, calling for DIR-016 to join them in the conference room. He arrived almost instantly, his mental representation that of his rather sallow-skinned android, with an alarming amount of dense green information glowing around his head where his Pattern was displayed visually in the virtual space.

"You called, sir?" DIR-016 asked.

"Yes. Thank you for coming so quickly. Everyone, this is Director-016, until very recently the Pattern in charge of the mine to the north."

"Actually," he interrupted, "I have been searching your databases," Mary glanced over at Storough with a look somewhere between disdain and an upset stomach. She had little use for the Pattern. "For names, and I have come up with one that I think I like."

Maritius raised an interested eyebrow. "Really? And what name is that?"

"Well, building from my D-I-R abbreviation, I believe I would like to be called Derek-16."

"Not just Derek?"

"Maybe occasionally, but Derek-16 is my full name."

Maritius smiled. "Well, everyone, this is Derek-16. I think he can help us with our problem."

"What problem is that?" the Pattern asked.

Maritius quickly filled him in on their desired attack plan, of destroying air defenses, then ground troops, then everything else. "So you see," Maritius concluded, "our problem is that we'd like to do a high-speed hit-and-run, but at the distance we need to fire at, there are no chassis that can both move quickly and carry that sort of artillery."

"Well, it is very simple," Derek said. "You desire high speed, high accuracy, and high damage potential. You need a Jeffy to carry the artillery payload of a Luger."

"But it would take four Jeffies just to carry the _parts_ for a Luger's barrel," Ryan Storough protested. He was obviously at the end of a very short rope, and having a Core pattern in his military council was not the thing to help matters.

"Exactly," Derek-16 responded with a knowing smile, and very shortly, that same smile was on Maritius' digital features.

*****

Jack Dobson, standing in his twelve-foot-tall Advanced C-Kbot, had been working for eighteen hours straight. He had a mixture of caffeine, artificially produced adrenaline, medical nanobots coursing through his veins. Even though he felt like his blood was sludge, he couldn't argue t he fact that he was awake and alert. It was the dead of night, yet it might as well have been midday for all the activity in the ARM base. C.K-bots and construction vehicles were busy, all 'lathing attachments to the Jeffies as they rolled out of the 'lathes of the vehicle plant. The new design for the Jeffy, the result of the efforts of Maritius, Janet Donix, and Derek-16, was simply too unorthodox for the vehicle plant's 'lathes to accept immediately. Dobson and one of his design specialists had spent a few hours trying to reprogram the vehicle plant's computers, but the problems kept mounting as the time slipped away. Rather than argue programming syntax and 'lathe resource distribution graphs with the factory computers, they had reached a compromise; the plants churned out slightly modified Jeffy hulls, the research labs churned out the 'repairs and upgrades,' and the repair hangars - with manual help from construction pilots - integrated the parts into a coherent whole.

Jump-off was set for seven o'clock, Adriata time, the next morning, and the 'lathers were racing to finish the last of the Jeffies. Most of the front of the vehicle was unchanged, but the rear had been extensively upgraded. A second set of rear drive wheels were placed on either side of the upgraded engines, which now took up twice the space in the back. The chassis of the vehicle was extended but the upper hull was not, and the space above the new set of drive wheels was an open bed like that of a civilian pickup-truck. The Jeffies were rolling out of the plants with the upgraded shocks and struts necessary for greater payload, but the extra energy 'lathes and control equipment had to be installed by hand, as well as the linkages between the factory-produced front portion and the lab-produced rear add-on. The new design cut maneuverability by a significant amount, but it could also move about the same speed with a much greater payload. They would need it.

In one of the repair hangars Derek-16 had been given free reign with the programmable 'lathes, and he was churning out parts to what he called his 'Mobile Mortar.' The basic design was of a snap-together weapon in four parts: an energy 'lathe and plasma converter, a barrel section, and the two mount pieces. Each was relatively light and wouldn't weigh down a Jeffy very much. The plasma shot was much greater that what was to be expected from a mobile version; something along the order of a Guardian's ammunition. The downside was that it took an impossibly long time to reload. The 'lathe in the plasma converter portion needed external energy from the handler's K-bot, but the plan was for it to power up between shots, while the Jeffy squad darted from one location to another.

Maritius was overseeing the production of the stripped-down, armorless Erasers from the advanced K-bot lab and setting advanced production orders for Atlases and the slow, mine-laying Podgers. He and Mary were still debating what the best unit was to send in as a strike force to handle the ground troops that would inevitably come looking for the mortar squads. Eventually they decided on Peewees and Zippers, planning on using the ARM's ultimate advantage of mobility and speed to simply harass the Core units to death.

As dawn neared, the finishing touches went on the specialized K-bots that the other half of the mortar squads would be wearing. Everyone not directly involved in the building was sent to get a few hours' sleep before they were put on a regimen of drugs that would keep them up for three days.

Just before Maritius headed to bed, Mary Jennings and Ryan Storough stopped him. "Sir," Ryan began seriously.

_Uh-oh_, Maritius thought. With this opening, it can't be good. "Yes?"

"Well, sir, we've all decided that you shouldn't come on this raid with us."

Maritius was half expecting that anyway. "Yes, I know. I'd planned on staying back here for defense."

Mary coughed once, and Storough continued. "Well, that's just it, sir. If this raid fails, then they'll come back looking for the base, here . . . and we won't have many defenses . . ."

"What are you saying?" Maritius asked.

"We don't think you should be here when they come find it," Mary said quickly. Maritius stared at her blankly. "We're sending you off to the east, away from the base. There's a mountain range about 100 klicks east . Ryu's sending along a few of his best pilots in Hawks to accompany you and an Atlas, and we want you to start a new base there." Maritius opened his mouth to protest, the gentle light of the living quarters' hall shining on his young face. "No, no, I'm sure you don't want to do this, but it's best. Besides, we'll have a secondary base started for when we take the Core outpost to the west."

Maritius leaned against the door and crossed his arms, glaring at his two friends. "Alright, fine. I'll do it. But I'll expect to be hearing from you folks, you realize this."

"Of course, Maritius. We'll send word with a Peeper as soon as we've got the outpost under control."


	8. Offensive

Satrayan Subreman, Satyr to his friends, rubbed sleep from his eyes before climbing into the modified medical exoskeleton that was to be his bedroom, kitchen, and bathroom for the next few days. The exoskeleton was exactly that, a skeletal frame that surrounded his body like child's toy made from sticks, but did not cover him; he was mostly open to the elements while wearing it. It amplified his strength, purified water and food for him, and was equipped with a small nanolathe that had originally been programmed for medical purposes but had been wiped and reprogrammed.

The Jeffy was already rumbling as he crawled onto it, sitting backwards and locking himself in with a thick strap. He then lashed the plasma converter for his mortar over his legs, making sure it wouldn't shift during the bumpy ride

The pilot of his Jeffy called to him over the short-range comm, "Squad 5 Exo Leader, this is Squad 5 Jeffy Leader. How's your team looking?"

"One sec," he said with a yawn.

"Not get much sleep, Satyr?" his driver chuckled. They had been friends since being cloned and decanted on the same day.

"No, drugs just take longer to kick in on me than other people." He slid his thumb out of the exo's metal gauntlet and keyed a different radio channel. "Squad 5 Exo, this is 5 Exo leader, report status."

"This is Barrel 1, strapped down and ready to roll, Exo leader." He glanced over at the ARM trooper in the standard exoskeleton, holding the barrel of the mortar across his lap.

"Mount 1, good to go." To his right, another standard exoskeleton held a portion of the mortar mount.

"Eraser one, bright-eyed," the pilot remarked, stifling a yawn. Directly behind Satyr's Jeffy, he saw a Jeffy with the unmistakable shape of an Eraser on it's back. The Eraser was stripped down to the frame, open to the elements like the other exos, but the bar of jamming equipment and the slowly tumbling jammer definitely marked it as an Eraser. The second portion of the mortar mount was strapped across its legs.

"Squad 5 Jeffy Leader, this is 5 Exo Leader, we're ready to roll."

"Copy that, just waiting for the word, Exo Leader."

*****

Mary stood waiting in her Maverick. She'd been unable to resist taking a few of the heavier K-bots in, and since the construction had finished early, she had authorized the building of as many Mavericks as possible. She'd had to make some sacrifices; they weren't as well armored and many of the redundant internal systems had been removed. So far, over fifteen had been built, and the number might be an even twenty before she was ready to give the order to move out.

She nervously flexed her hands, the machine's holsters flicking in and out s the K-bot tried to respond to commands that weren't meant for it. She watched as the Atlas descended towards the Commander.

*****

Maritius felt the electromagnetic clamps lock onto his shoulders. His suit automatically gave a 'good' response to the Atlas. The transport lifted into the air and parts of the command suit began popping and groaning as they were stretched and pulled in directions opposite to those they'd been designed for. Maritius lifted one arm as best he could with his shoulder clamped and threw a gentle salute, no higher than his chin, towards Mary and Storough in the ground units.

He hadn't meant for it to be so public a gesture, but he realized that the entire strike force was probably watching him. From points along the edge of the forest, hundreds of K-bots raised their arm to return the gesture. Over the stream of the Atlas' motors he could hear the vehicles revving their engines in salute as well.

He couldn't help but feel that he most likely wouldn't see many of them again. He shut off all non-essential radio contact and gently cried to himself, the weight of his mission and the lives of his friends finally weighing on his 15-year-old psyche, as the Hawks fell into formation around the Atlas and it turned to speed east.

*****

"This is Peeper 1. Everyone reading me loud and clear?" A chorus of affirmatives came through the neural interface. The pilot didn't particularly care who had answered, but he assumed that everyone had and, hearing no dissenters, continued. "Everyone getting a map?" The flood of sound washed over him as everyone confirmed that the overhead radar projection from the Peeper was being bounced through secure channels all over the strike force. "I'm headin' in for a look."

The Peeper inverted and dropped quickly. Two robotic automated Peepers mirrored him a few hundred yards away on either wing. He spun a few times, chuckling as he watched their advanced computers copy him exactly, a few milliseconds behind his every move.

The Peeper Mk II, Maritius' new design, sped north towards the Core base, feinting from the south to confuse the defenders. It flew like the rocket that it was, mostly thrust with only enough wing to keep it aloft at over Mach 3.

"Reading a few large power units. Fusion reactors, I'm thinking." The Peeper dropped closer and closer to the ground, seeming to skip off the small hills like a stone across a pond.

"And here we are." The pilot had spotted and passed the first missile defenses - two light Pulverizer towers - even before he had finished his sentence. He passed as close as he could to the towers, his proximity making it impossible for the turrets to track him as he streaked across their range of fire. The missiles leapt from the silos anyway, and attitude jets pushed hard along their noses to try and spin the weapons around to catch the three Peepers.

His arm flicked out and pushed the throttle the last touch forward, the resource 'lathes flying and fuel screaming through the jet, afterburners slamming the Peeper over Mach 4. The base blurred beneath him, the speed of his processors the only thing that distinguished Doomsday Machines, Intimidators, Punishers, GAAT guns, and factories from each other. Defenses all swung menacingly towards the flight of ARM aircraft, but sheer speed gave them a chance at survival.

The automated Peeper to his right exploded as three missiles tracking it finally locked on. The metal shards were thrown wide as lasers lanced in front of the pilot, his skin tingling as the heat reached the outside of his plane. He rolled sharply, diving, so that he had to thread his way between a GAAT gun and a solar collector, and soon found himself in the small space between two rows of solar collectors. The Peeper to his left, unable to mimic his hiding place, was destroyed as a laser locked on and lanced out, searing one wing from the fuselage.

He was almost out of the base, and in front of him was a small hill. He leaned the stick back up and the craft leapt up the hill, bursting over the trees on the far side and banking hard to the left to swing out to sea. The pilot caught something out of the corner of his eye and jerked his head quickly, the neural interface keeping his head from moving and twitching the external camera instead. A huge ship, far larger than a Warlord, and flat-decked, was floating out, past the shipyards and the smaller destroyers. He unconsciously zoomed in for a closer look.

The last sound the strike force heard from the Peeper was the sound of three independent missile explosions, blurring into one and resolving into the gentle hiss of static.

*****

Alarms were sounding deep in the Core base, and they'd been transmitted out to CAR-001, the prototype mobile-aircraft-production ship. The Pattern overseeing the bridge sent back an all-clear code, as the fifth flight of Peepers in three days was destroyed by the squad of Vamps which were returning to wait on the ship's launch catapults.

The Core base gently settled back into its routine, the momentary distraction of the ARM aircraft rolled under the endless march of moments.

*****

Ryan Storough shook his head to clear his thoughts of the data he'd just seen from the Peeper pilot. His mortar squad, Squad 2, was moving around to the south of the base, setting up almost dead south of the center of the base. Squad 1 had moved in front of them, to line up dead south of the base, and Squad 10 would be directly north of Squad 1, the ten squads forming a perfect semi-circle around the Core base, farther out than an Intimidator could reach.

Mary Jennings had split the squad of Mavericks and was somewhere out there, each group of Mavericks hovering somewhere around Squads 3 and 8, so that they could respond to attacks along their half of the strike force. Other K-bots, squads of two Zippers and four Peewees, were scattered throughout the forest, behind the main ring of the Jeffy squads. There was a minimal amount of chatter between leaders of the Jeffy squads when tightbeam communication was possible through the trees. Four Atlases, each carrying a Podger, were each accompanied by another Atlas with an Eraser. They were hovering just above the tree line, skillfully camouflaged against the foliage.

Ryan pulled to a stop and the med-exo climbed from the back of his Jeffy onto the ground. He swiveled a camera to watch as the four troopers began clumsily arranging the pieces of the mortar. They eventually had it in place, and the Squad 2 Exo Leader in the medical exoskeleton began nanolathing a few of the joints of the mortar, nervously glancing at a small screen on his wrist.

*****

CCT-065489, Command Center Technician, waited in the fields of data that were the Command Center. She was positioned inside a set of camera data streams, on all sides of her, from which she could see a vast majority of the empty forest to the north of the base. The cameras did not display visually, although they could if she'd wanted them to, but instead she read the unadulterated streams of data that flowed from the audio/visual units, preferring to see the data stream directly. She felt other CCT units around her, all of them slowly earning the simtime that was the only Core form of currency. She had two hours left until she was on break for a full two planetary rotations, and she was bored.

A spark caught her eye and her attention focused on the camera that was looking into the forest, from a Pulverizer. She peered closer and closer, zooming in the camera and panning across the wide expanse of green, but found nothing. A semblance of a shrug passed through her, and she turned her attention from the camera.

The camera's readout suddenly disappeared, a hole in the data stream of the command center. The Command Center programming automatically pulled her focus to another camera, mounted on a Pulverizer next to the one that had disappeared, nanoseconds after the incident. She watched the slowed video feed as a plasma globe landed almost directly on top of the missile tower, slightly tipped on a hill, and ate through it from the top, finally dissipating at the base and chewing through the supports of the tower. The empty shell toppled as she hit a general alarm.

*****

Satyr stared intently at the readout on the back of the right hand of the med-exo, at the list of ten mortars. Mortar ten suddenly flicked from green to red, meaning it had fired, and was reloading. An eternal wait, during which he checked once more that the 'lathing of the mortar was complete, and squad eight released their shot. The readout flicked from green to red as well.

_One more, _he thought. The first few stages of the attack had been carefully planned, down to where they would move and what they would target. He checked once more that he was correctly aimed at a Cobra that guarded one of two Doomsday Machines, and went back to waiting. The Jeffies were gently humming in a circle around him, and the two standard-exos were crouching next to the mortar, tampering with the plasma flow and storage. The stripped Eraser was pacing restlessly, its pilot visibly nervous as he strolled around the small circle formed by the Jeffies.

A strike squad of Zippers and Peewees strolled by, endlessly patrolling between Satyr's squad and squad four. Squad two's mortar fired, and Satyr thought through what the ARM expected the Core defenses to be doing. A strike force of Vamps would be headed north towards the first disturbance, and at the second shot would probably bank off to take a look at that location as well. Those two ARM squads should be packed up and moving high-speed through the forest by now, with the energy converter on their mortars recharging for another shot.

Squad two would either draw the attention of more air patrols, or else a quick ground recon squad of Weasels. The Atlases were all hovering to the east, waiting until a later stage of the game to enter because they would quickly be ripped apart by any air defense. There wasn't a single unit in the strike force designed as anti-air, although most could take a few shots skyward in a pinch. The others were simply too slow, and so they were relying on camouflage and jamming to keep the Vamps away.

The wait between squad two's shot and his own nearly killed Satyr, and the thirty second countdown on his readout seemed to move slower and slower the closer it got to the time, but eventually, it read 3 . . . then 2 . . . and finally 1. He fired his mortar.

There was a moment as the final plasma streamed into the tanks inside the mortar mount, and flooded into the barrel, releasing with a mighty kick. The mortar was two feet into the dense ground as the two troopers grabbed it by the barrel and wrenched it out. Satyr barely had time to notice that the four other mortars had also fired, targeting one of the two Cobras that stood watch over a Doomsday Machine, as he ran in to reclaim only nanobots programmed to recognize his code, effectively removing the seams from the joints and allowing the mortar to be pulled apart. The Eraser was looking up at the neat round hole, surrounded on fifty feet by black, where the plasma globe had instantly charred the leaves on the way out. Each of the four exo-clad troopers grabbed a part, hopefully theirs but not necessarily, and leapt onto the backs of the Jeffies, strapping in with moments to spare before the revamped scout vehicles tore off into the forest for their next destination, leaves and ground cover flying from under the studded tires.

*****

"Talk to me, here," Mary said, nervously shaking inside the Maverick's cockpit. She'd finally given up and turned off the movement interface with the eighteen-foot-tall K-bot to save its twitching memcomposite muscles.

"One second, we're getting a visual." A few Peepers had streaked in above the base in the confusion, and couldn't detect any enemy fighters climbing towards them yet. Their high-altitude cameras zoomed in tightly, the whole picture shaking with the minute vibrations of the Peeper's hull. "Okay, two Pulverizers to the north are out," the Peeper reported in a tightbeam to Mary's Maverick. Other Peepers were looking at other targets and reporting through the lead Peeper. "Northern Cobra's out. Southern Cobra could use another hit, but one barrel seems to be non-functional from here." A slight pause. "Alright, the latest shot just took out a Pulverizer."

_Pretty successful so far, _Mary thought to herself. "Let's hear troop movements."

"All air moving to the north. There's some Weasels and Instigators moving south, but they're stopping on the final hill, not moving into the forest."

Mary thought for a moment. "Alright, Peeper Leader. From now on, you're calling the shots. Warn the mortar squads if they get into trouble, but mostly let them do their thing. Call in a Podger to 'lathe some mines in an area where there's slow-moving troops coming and the minelayer will have time to get out. Otherwise, you direct the two Maverick groups to take out the ground troops where necessary. Use the Zipper and Peewee squads only to clean up after a mine, or as a large attack. You up to it?"

"'S what I was made for," Peeper Leader replied.

"Alright, from now on, I'm under your command. Mary out."

*****

Maritius had traveled for nearly an hour before coming to a stop in the foothills of a tall range of mountains. As his command suit walked towards the signs of a metal deposit, Maritius expertly darted down its leg and jumped lightly to the ground.

"Sir, I dunno if I should do that." Maritius was currently arguing with a Hawk pilot. The Atlas was on the ground, waiting until it was decided what was happening.

"What do you mean 'you dunno if you should do that'?" Maritius asked. The mike on his throat transmitted short-range to the command suit, where his words were bounced tightbeam to the Hawk. "I'm your commanding officer!"

"Yeah, but Major Jennings . . ."

"Hell, I'm her commanding officer too! I'm your commanding officer's commanding officer! I'm the Commander! I command everyone!" Maritius was protesting loudly, letting a slight note of hysteria enter his voice. He hoped the Hawk pilot wasn't watching the ground, because he'd see Maritius stretched out on the ground, hands behind his head, calmly watching one of the solar energy kites dance in the wind.

"Alright, sir. Fine. What do you want me to do?" the Hawk pilot asked resignedly.

"Great. Spread out, within tightbeam distance, back to the base, and relay me updates as they come in."

The Hawk pilot sighed and muttered something about 'exactly what she said not to do,' but complied. "It's gonna be too far."

"Fire brigade it, then. Have each Hawk wait for the other one, then run a bit until they can tightbeam to the next one."

"Yessir." The Hawk pilot relayed the message to his squadron and they all sped off towards the horizon. As soon as they left, the Atlas pilot knew what was going on, and popped the hatch of his aircraft. He climbed out and sat next to Maritius, extending a huge hand.

"Heya. I'm Jervis." Maritius found himself, even at over six feet, still looking up at the huge black man. His hair was shaggy, dreadlocks, the style was named, and he had a thick New Welsh accent, where most of the British from ancient Earth had gone.

"Maritius."

The man smiled. "I know."

"You're big."

"Yup." The large man pulled out a package of papers and a small pouch of a recreational drug grown in the greenhouses.

"We might have to lift soon," Maritius said warningly.

"I've got a de-tox in the cabin," Jervis answered, lighting the rolled cigarette.

Maritius sat and watched him for a while before expectantly asking, "Got another de-tox in your cabin?"

Jervis smiled widely and passed the pouch.

*****

Ryan drove wildly, spurred on by the warning of the spotter that a squad of Instigators was right behind them. The Core tanks were rushing towards the area where squad four (which was now a full kilometer away) had last fired (though squad two was now passing through that area). He caught a glimpse through the trees of two Atlases speeding away, one carrying a Podger, and heard an explosion behind him. He smiled grimly, knowing the mine-layers had done their work. Light infantry K-bots would be by in a moment to deal with them if they weren't.

He got a warning call from squad three and corrected his course, reminding himself that he needed to avoid not only his last firing location, but the other squads' as well. The Core didn't care who had fired from where as long as they found someone. He swerved his squad deeper into the thick forest as he heard a flight of Vamps scream overhead, desperately searching for a visual to direct the ground troops. He reached his destination and braked hard, the studded tires gripping the detritus of the forest floor. The med-exo on the back of his Jeffy used the momentum to roll off and crash to the ground, quickly pulling out his part of the mortar. The exo squad scrambled into position and began 'lathing their weapon into solidity. Storough settled back for another wait, revving his engines as he silently bickered with his animal instincts that were telling him to run.

*****

Peter-63 leapt behind a tree as the laser blast came streaking by. The AK was lumbering towards him, flanked by two more of its fellows on either side, and Peter had gotten separated from the rest of his small squad. A Peewee was a match for an AK, maybe, but not for three.

He heard more laser fire but saw none of it. He automatically concluded that someone else was attacking and darted out from behind the tree. He did not notice his 'real' body swaying gently in the cryo tank in the middle of the Peewee, and instead felt the memcomposite muscles of his Peewee's legs bunching, the ankle actuators straining as he leaned into a turn at a fell run. He began pounding towards another bit of cover while firing at the AKs, hitting the flank that was now exposed because of their turn to meet the latest threat. They soon fell under the combined fire of the ARM troops.

The Zipper pilot leading their small team spoke quickly. "You alright, P63?"

"Check," Peter responded.

"Let's get moving. They might have transmitted these coordinates. Let the Peeper Leader know."

*****

Maritius swayed over to the Atlas' cockpit and retrieved the two de-tox needles from the tiny first-aid pouch, focusing all his energy on watching the needles in his hand to make sure they didn't escape.

He placed himself next to Jervis with a sigh, and both sat watching the command suit 'lathe a vehicle plant. "Pretty, idn't it?" Maritius said, poking at his stiffened blue hair.

"Yup." Jervis lay on his back and stared up at the three kites in his field of vision.

"Got an update, Maritius." Maritius sat up and looked around, finally registering that it was a Hawk pilot who was talking to him.

"What is it?"

"The attack's just started, and resistance is pretty stiff."

Maritius looked up at Jervis. "You wanna go?"

Jervis shrugged, reaching for a de-tox derm. "Sure."

Maritius slapped the small bandage to his wrist and felt the tickle of the medical nanobots climbing into his skin, preparing the way for the detoxification serum. He felt it begin a few seconds later and he got up and ran towards his command suit, feeling adrenaline and medicine mix to tear down the drug-induced vapors clouding his mind. Jervis was headed off towards the Atlas just as quickly.

"Hawk, tell your buddies to wait where they are and then get in to an escort position around me as the Atlas comes by."

"Roger." The Hawk sped off towards the horizon to relay the message. Maritius was in the command suit and waiting for pickup in under a minute, striving to keep his processors calm so as not to make time pass any slower than it already would. He was looking at a long flight west . . .

*****

Satyr dropped the barrel of the Mortar together and began frantically 'lathing it for another shot when one of the Peepers sent him a communication.

"Priority target Cobra. Coordinates follow."

"Roger. We're on it." Satyr quickly reprogrammed the firing solution and waited for the last of the plasma to stream in. "Let me know if this does it." Satyr fired the mortar and was already reclaiming the joints as his squad's Eraser stared at the round, charred hole in the leaves and chuckled to himself.

*****

Mary was running through the forest, eight Mavericks at her side, to answer the call of a group of Peewees and one of the mortar squads. They saw laser fire up ahead and burst into the clearing too late to help. Two Core Cans were just trundling away. The Mavericks opened up and reduced them to slag in moments. She looked around at her squad; one Maverick had taken some damage to one shoulder, but otherwise they'd escaped without injury.

Except for their comrades.

The exoskeletons of the mortar squad were cut to bits. In most instances, the pilots were still attached. The Jeffies were ripped to shreds, and the few Peewees who had answered the call for help had been quickly overpowered by the two Cans. _Later_, Mary thought in response to the emotions roiling in her gut. The Core command had undoubtedly figured out their strategy based on the recon the Cans would have gotten of the mortar squad, which meant that the Core would shortly have all the pieces they needed to solve the puzzle of the mortar fire.

*****

CCT-854237 opened the channel to the high-priority message from CAN-317. The sender was now destroyed, so the CC tech couldn't ask the sender for a repeat transmission. He listened to it twice before sending it on to his superior officer.

"Repeat, you said they're doing _what_?"

*****

Ryu, sitting back on the runway of the aircraft plant, was listening to all the transmissions from Peeper Leader.

"Repeat, you said he's doing _what_?" Ryu exploded in response to the message regarding Maritius' movement. "That idiot!" Ryu punched the VTOL throttle to full and his aircraft leapt off the ground. "All Hawks, follow me." Ryu sped for the horizon, chasing towards the Atlas that carried his Commander.

*****

"Peeper Leader, how are we doing on those air defenses?" Mary asked, her Maverick squad prowling through the woods to cut off a group of Core units headed toward two mortar squads. A huge explosion to her right told her that another group of Core ground troops had fallen afoul of a set of mines.

"Mostly out, I think, if you're not counting the lasers. A few Pulverizers left in the north, and one or two more Cobras in the south. What should we target next?"

"I've got an idea. Get everyone to these coordinates," Mary gave two spots, one south and slightly west of the base, the other straight north east. "Make sure the Mavericks are there for defense, and have the Peewees and Zippers get ready to flank. Podgers laying mines the whole way between the base and those spots. We're going to dig in. And Peeper?"

"Yup?"

"Get me the coordinates on the southern-most fusion plant."

Mary smiled to herself as a huge plasma shell raced overhead. The Intimidators were firing blindly into the forest. They were getting desperate.

*****

"Sir, I must say, I really don't like what you're doing."

"I know you don't, Ryu, but there's no way I'm just gonna sit there while a major offensive happens."

"But if that major offensive goes wrong, sir, you're endangering the entire ARM presence on this planet."

Maritius would have liked to have towered over Ryu at this point, but instead, his intimidation was slightly reduced because he was immobilized and hanging from the belly of an aircraft. And he really couldn't argue the point. He was reacting emotionally, and what he was doing was stupid. So he fell back to giving orders, which came naturally. "Accompany me to within three klicks of the battle, and then hang back and wait for attack orders from the spotter. Clear?"

"Yessir," Ryu said with finality, falling into a tight guard position directly on the Atlas' left flank where he could glare at Maritius.

*****

Storough heard the instructions from the spotter plane high above and spun the Jeffy around tightly to a squealed protest from the med-exo strapped to his trunk. His studded tires slipped, stuttering over the ground, then the back four bit the undergrowth with a satisfying tug and Ryan shot forward.

"Wait a second, everyone hold on," Peeper Leader said on an open channel. "They're sending in Pyros. They're gonna burn us out of the forest."

Ryan's screen lit up with the nearest two Pyros and he decided immediately. "Squad two, let's take out those two." He turned again and sped off through the forest, heading for the first Pyro. The two squads of Mavericks move to intercept the Pyros as well, and the combined forces dealt with them quickly. There were more on the way, but Major Jennings gave the order to reform at the new coordinates rather than chase the enemy piecemeal. Soon the Mavericks were all in position, forming a wall four hundred yards long in front of the area where the mortar crews would soon be. Mary knew that her plan was being mirrored in the northeast. She spotted Storough's Jeffy as it sped through the underbrush, peeking out of the forest for a moment before diving back into the darkness of the trees, followed by three more Jeffies. They appeared to have a few burns, but the troopers they were carrying were all alive and well.

"Hey there," Mary said as he passed.

Storough kept up the conversation on tightbeam as he got into position. "Hey. Should we wait for the other crews before opening up?"

"Only one more, they'll be here in a second."

"Should we call in the air attack?"

"Already done."

*****

Ryu got the authorization for the air attack from Peeper Leader as the Atlas was nearing the base.

"You are clear for the attack," Maritius said pointedly.

"No sir. We will wait until you've safely landed, then commence with the attack."

Maritius was about to protest, but decided against it. Doctrinally, at least, Ryu was in the right about this as well. A Commander in the air was the most vulnerably time, and having a strong escort of fighters and gunships did make Maritius feel a bit better about hanging helplessly beneath the transport. He glanced around and the few dozen Hawks, augmented by the older-model Freedom Fighters and the strong Brawler gunships.

"We in good company," Jervis said languidly.

"Sure are," Maritius answered with a chuckle.

*****

"Alright, everyone, open up with the mortars. Mavericks ready for a counter-attack, Peewees and Zippers pick up any stragglers, and Peepers, let those Podgers know when they've gotta stop 'lathing those mines. Good luck everyone."

Mary turned around to glance at the four mortars. Each kicked at roughly the same time. She tracked the plasma shells as they arced through the sky, all landing squarely on what she hoped was the fusion reactor.

It took only a few moments for the Core to realize that the mortars had stopped and were making a concerted effort from a few key points. The Core ground troops began moving in, and the air bombardment began.

*****

"I'm getting a second request for the air attack, specifically for anti-air," Maritius said.

"As am I." Ryu answered.

"You going to attend to that?"

"No sir. As long as you insist on coming to the dance, I insist on escorting you all the way there."

*****

The Core units arrived sooner than Mary expected, and she hoped the northern group was more prepared than her group was. She sighted down one arm and fired a single shot, the plasma shell ripping apart an AK from the center. She watched a Raider roll over a mine, tripping it to explode and tearing apart three K-bots around it. The seven Mavericks at her side were all doing well, but the Core had the advantage of numbers.

Mary absently noted the mortars firing off another round as she picked a new target, moving forward for a better shot. The scream of jets overhead - an unwelcome noise since she'd seen no friendly air support yet - brought Hurricanes, and Hurricanes brought only trouble for Mary. Their payloads tumbled from their doors, tearing a gash through the trees and disabling two of the mortars. At least seven lives lost, she noted from her command readouts.

The plasma shells from the mortars found their mark again, this time to full effect. She felt the ground shake and saw the brilliant flash of light of a fusion reactor going nova. Four Vamps tumbled out of the sky as the shockwave hit them. The fusion reactor was gone, maybe two of them, and that meant it was time to take the battle on the offensive.

She gave the word and the K-bots moved out, leaving the Jeffies behind to take care of the mortars and squads of troopers. Mary's Maverick broke into an ungainly run as it trundled out of the forest and onto the cleared plain around the base, chasing and firing at Core units who were running back to defend the new breach in the base.

She looked up to see two Vamps screaming down towards her and felt the familiar tingle of a missile lock when suddenly the two Vamps disappeared in a cloud of explosion. She looked up at four Hawks diving towards the enemy aircraft, and they were not alone. All over the skies, ARM aircraft were taking over.

*****

The Zippers bounded in front, slowing slightly to let the Peewees keep up, as Peter-63's squad cut across the edge of the forest to kill off two more Pyros. They were too late, of course; fires were firmly established in the east and north and would be spreading quickly. He saw the huge flash over the hills of a fusion reactor exploding and spotted the Core K-bots turning back for a tighter defensive posture. He thought of chasing them but stayed, fearing the Core aircraft, and besides, he'd been given no order.

When the Hurricane bombers passed overhead without dropping their bombs then banked back toward the base, he no longer needed to wait for an order. He stopped, turned, and looked towards the nearest entrance, guarded by two Punishers. As the battle-lust hit him, adrenaline coursed through his stunted body, curled inside the suit that was his mind's true shell. He raised both hands high, EMG's firing into the air, and yelled "CHAAARGE!!" aloft to the gods.

The Zippers stopped dead, the three Peewees of his squad behind them, as they turned and looked at Peter running across the landscape. The leader of the squad simply shrugged, his Zipper's shoulders raising slightly, and took off after Peter, picking up the cry himself.

*****

The Peeper Leader called for his small squadron to break and run when someone noticed six Vamps begin a steep climb, coming to finish off the spotters. As he inverted, preparing to dive after his friends, the Peeper Leader noticed a friendly IFF signal in the center of the barren plain to the north of the Core outpost. He leveled off, peering down with his camera, momentarily ignoring the Vamps tearing at him. He looked down and saw a lone Peewee crossing the bare plain between the forest and the Core base, his squad-mates chasing to keep up with him. "Now that's what I call balls," he muttered to himself with a grunt, noting the two Punishers flanking the entrance nearest the Peewee. "That gets rewarded."

He flicked over to a wide communication back towards the base. "I've got a firing solution I need in the next ten seconds. Who can take care of it?" Twelve missiles tore through the air from the Vamps and he rolled sharply, reflexively triggering the single chafe canister his Peeper possessed. If he dove now he could get away, but he would lose his tightbeam lock down to the battlefield.

"That'd be me," Maritius stated.

"What's that?" he asked, the second salvo of missiles already coming towards him as the first salvo missed tracked the chaff with their tiny brains.

"My escort's got you covered. Give us the coordinates." Peeper Leader tightbeamed the Punishers' coordinates to Maritius before the warheads of twelve Core missiles caught up to him, his last act used to save a humble Peewee.

*****

Mary darted through a small pass, looking up as a Punisher exploded under the hail of fire from the Mavericks behind her. Two Zippers darted past, dodging around her as they ran forward, targeting a GAAT gun. She raised both weapons, helping them out with a few well-placed shells at the base of the heavy laser tower.

As she rounded a gentle corner she spotted the destruction of the fusion reactors. There were definitely two craters, though they had mostly melted into one larger depression. The smooth sides told of the immense heat released in the fusion explosion. She could see disabled units around the rim of the craters, not melted or vaporized like those closer to the blast but still killed instantly by radiation and shockwave.

She heard the spotter's request for a bombing run and was surprised to hear Maritius answer. She looked up to the west to try and find him, and was rewarded with a picture that she would later download from the suit's video memory and have framed for her wall.

The electromagnetic clamps were just releasing and the Atlas was pulling away, up and back. Maritius had been dropped off straight to the west of the center of the Core base, on top of a small ridge. Behind him, the forest, lit a few minutes before by stray Pyros, was burning furiously, outlining Maritius in flames. His escort of nearly three score of ARM aircraft, trailing behind him until now, was streaming over his head as the Commander raised his left arm, almost as if signaling the attack. At the very top of her view, three Hawks were chasing seven Vamps from left to right, and two Vamps were in the process of exploding. The commander's right arm glowed with immeasurable amounts of suppressed energy as his D-gun charged, the non-matter waiting to be released.

Mary had to remind herself to move as a Crasher came around the corner of a factory and put two missile round into her legs.

*****

Peter-63 paused for just a moment as he saw the Punisher's twin cannons come to bear on him. But his speed was renewed as bombs pelting down on the plasma battery from the wing of Phoenixes clouded his vision. They turned sharply after their bombing dive, apparently warned against going out to sea and the perils it presented.

Peter glanced behind him and saw Mavericks, Zippers, Peewees, and even Jeffies caught up in the impetus of his charge. His leader, in the Zipper right behind him, was waving him forward, to continue leading the charge. Peter-63 put on another burst of speed and ran harder towards the gap in the hills.

He saw factories in front of him, with K-bots all lumbering towards his commander, and he immediately opened fire. His first target, unluckily enough, was a Can, but he managed to avoid the lumbering K-bot's turrets until a Maverick rounded the hill and took care of it with a few quick shots from it's heavy plasma guns. Peter-63 gave another shout and charged towards the column of K-bots.

*****

Maritius watched, a beautiful sight, as green and blue units poured in from two sides, north and south, completely erasing the column of black and red Core units. There had been some strong units, but they fell easily to his D-gun firing along the length of the column and mixed K-bots flanking from north and south. A mile-long stretch leading down to the water exploded, almost in unison, as the factories all self-destructed to keep the ARM from capturing them. The wreckage of Core units and structures was spread before him like a road leading to the sea, where a large fleet waited for him.

The Phoenixes had circled around and destroyed the lone remaining defense that was within range aside from the Intimidators, one of the Doomsday machines. Maritius ordered them to destroy the Intimidators, and checked in with his support staff.

"Everyone here?" Maritius asked.

"Yup," Mary answered.

"Yeah," Storough responded, now rolling from the forest to the south.

"Problem, sir," Ryu stated.

"What's that?"

"Too many Vamps. Far too many. More than there were when we got here, even?"

"How is that possible?"

"I don't know, but the factories have all been neutralized?"

"Yes." Maritius stared out to sea and stopped. "It's that ship. That's the problem."

"What can we do?"

Maritius ran down the hill towards the base as the Intimidator barrels continued sweeping around on their huge turrets. "Wait! Don't destroy the Intimidators! Capture them! Disable them!"

The ARM units stopped their destruction, staring blankly, not really knowing what their Commander meant. A Hammer pilot quickly twitched her cannons to one side, their firing sequence already initiated, and lobbed the shells into the forest. The sudden change tipped her gyros beyond their limit and her K-bot fell over backward. The ARM units did have the intelligence to cluster around the base of the two remaining Intimidators so that they wouldn't be fired on. Maritius ran to the first Intimidator to find it still intact, but with a leak in its plasma coil. He 'lathed only enough nanobots to immobilize it and keep it from exploding before running towards the next one.

Maritius glanced up as he ran to see a cloud of Vamps, at least twenty, diving towards him. "Ryu . . ." he said.

"On it." Hawks dove from all directions through the sky, firing frantically at the Core aircraft that were diving towards their Commander. The aircraft were ignoring everything else to get a shot at the ARM Commander. Their ranks thinned drastically until only a few were charging at Maritius, but it became clear they weren't planning on firing, but crashing. Zippers and Peewees fired wildly into the air, trying to create a wall of weapons fire.

He raised his D-gun and fired straight at the nose of the lead Vamp. It disappeared as the non-matter D-sphere plowed through it, the remains of the aircraft peppering Maritius in a light mist. One of the others tried to shift course as Maritius moved, but could not and plowed into the ground. Another was knocked off course by a well-placed shot from a Maverick. The last struck Maritius hard on the arm, sending him reeling. He struck the ground, face down, and lay for a moment before getting up.

"Status?" Mary demanded.

"I'm fine."

Four heavy explosions went off around him and Maritius looked around frantically. Two had landed in the center of a cluster of units near an Intimidator and ARM units were flying through the air, some melted and fused together.

"What was THAT?" Maritius demanded. Ryu had been busy and Storough had not been in range, so the burden fell to Mary.

"Heavy explosive, lobbed from some Gauss structure on that ship, I'd think. Only thing with enough range."

"Shit, the launch catapults. They're using them as mortars." He reached the Intimidator and began capturing it, first immobilizing it, then slowly destroying and rebuilding its essential systems.

"How can they fire this far, though?" Mary protested.

"They're supposed to be throwing however many tons of Vamp into the air. A simple explosive won't be any work for them at all."

"I'm going to try and take out that ship," Ryu stated. Maritius spotted his Hawk turning towards the sea, and others banking to follow.

"You will NOT!" Maritius barked, the commanding tone in his voice unmistakable. "There are at least four Shredders out there, you will stay back out of range, and that goes for your whole crew." Ryu didn't answer, but simply turned away from his course. Maritius threw his communicator over to a wide-open channel. "Everyone head east, full speed, and don't stop until I tell you to. Go, go! Now!" He watched as all his ground troops began trundling and wheeling east, pouring over the hills and escaping out of the way of the Vamps and the threat of the carrier's bombardment.

Maritius swiveled the command suit's head - and cockpit - toward the ship and zoomed in the wall-sized HUD of its front window. It looked like a carrier, a Hive, but was at least five times larger. He zoomed in farther and spotted the nanolathes, not repairing, but building new aircraft. Five Vamps, and quicker than he could've built them as well. The 'lathes were incredibly powerful. He spotted ten Vamps already circling the carrier and realized they'd be coming in for another suicide run.

"There better be more Hawks on the 'lathe back home," Maritius muttered.

"Already done," Ryu answered. They wouldn't be done in time to aid in the fight, most likely, but if the battle stretched any longer they might make a difference. Maritius turned to his task of capturing the Intimidator, first locking it down as it prepared to lock on to a Maverick climbing the hill to the east. He guided the nanobots into the frame of the Intimidator, carefully severing recognition and guidance controls and finally changing the coordinates of the resource 'lathes.

The Intimidator was captured and given its target. Maritius swung his 'lathe and began laying down a light laser tower next to the huge plasma cannon, building it while he waited for the ponderous barrel to swing into position. Four more high explosive shots landed, not quite reaching Maritius. He assumed that he was safely, barely, out of range. More Vamps leapt from the Core carrier, circling up sharply and joining a throng that was now speeding towards Maritius.

"'Nother wave," he mentioned, deceptively calm.

"On it," Ryu answered, his Hawks once again swooping towards the Vamps to defend their Commander. They again destroyed all the Vamps, though four got through, slamming into Maritius and the base of the Intimidator.

"You okay?" Maritius heard the voice from far away as his eyes swam with red and his head throbbed. He felt like stakes had been driven through his body and were supporting his weight instead of his legs. He looked around, checking his sensors quickly, and immediately recovered, dulling the pain from the suit, standing, and continuing to pour nanobots on the frame of the light laser tower.

The Intimidator was in position and began shelling the large carrier. Maritius focused on it as he let his suit begin 'lathing another laser tower. He made minute corrections in the targeting of the huge plasma cannon, trying to compensate for environmental factors though he wasn't quite sure how to do it. The first few shots went far over the ship's deck as five Vamps slowly flew into the air, five electrified frames suddenly taking their place.

The Vamps, instead of waiting, darted straight in towards land. Maritius was worried for a moment, but he soon saw them passing far over his head, diving instead on his troops. The Hawks killed them easily, though there were a few casualties on the ground. The next Vamps chased straight after the ARM air defenses, and a major dogfight began, aided by a new group of Vamps every few minutes.

Maritius finally decided that the targeting system on his Intimidator had been damaged and sent some nanobots into the computer systems to repair it. His two light laser towers were firing at anything in range, which wasn't much, since the dogfight was taking place mostly high above.

"Commander, we're going to lose this battle if we don't stop that ship," Ryu said flatly.

"Working on it."

"There's just too damn many of them," Ryu muttered, grunting as his ship frantically spun away from two missiles. The Intimidator fired again and finally found its target.

The plasma shell ripped laterally through the deck, tearing apart one of the production pads. Sparks flew into the air as a resource teleporter exploded, and the ship rocked lightly with the impact of the huge globe of molten atoms. It began moving forward slightly, and Maritius waited forever for the plasma cannon to reload.

He saw two more planes, either ARM or Core, tumble from the sky, burning. Maritius fired again.

The cannon recoiled sharply, the shock absorbers breaking the surface of the half-dome of the Intimidator as they were meant to. As Maritius watched, he noted it seemed to be taking a long time for the barrel to slide forward again, until, in horror, he realized that it was stuck. He leapt from the ground, command suit rising a few feet, and gripped a piece of the Intimidator, trying to pull himself up. He scrambled for purchase, futilely pounding with his D-gun as he tried to grab at anything to help him up. There was a wrenching crack and the part Maritius had been clutching gave way, sending him tumbling to the ground. He landed heavily on his feet, leaning dangerously backwards. His gyros spun, trying to keep his weight centered, but he toppled, a loud crash sounding in his ears.

The crash slowly resolved into a low hiss and Maritius thought he had broken his communicator somehow. Slowly, almost as if he was only just beginning to hear it correctly, the hiss built into a loud cheer. He looked around, his head turning first to stare at the base of the Intimidator. As he slowly swung his head in the other direction, he spotted his forces, all on the top of the ridge to the east, jumping and screaming. The K-bots were wildly waving their arms and jumping as best they could, and the vehicles were digging their tires and treads into the ground, throwing clods of dirt back towards the smoldering forest. One excited Jeffy had raced down the hill and was spinning donuts over the wreckage of a Pulverizer, the exo-clad trooper on the back of his vehicle cheering with delight and holding on as tightly as she could.

Maritius got up slowly and looked out to sea as he noticed a Maverick lumbering towards him in an ungainly dance of joy, waving one broken plasma pistol. "You did it!" Mary called, her speakers broadcasting to the open air. The troops doubled their cheers.

A file itched at the back of Maritius' neural interface and he allowed it access. Mary's video file dumped into his skull and began playing, a view from the hill. The Intimidator fired repeatedly, missing the large ship each time, until finally a single production pad exploded in a shower of sparks. The next shot went sailing towards the ship and Maritius followed it with his eyes. It slowly dipped near the water, then into it, a five-foot sphere around the globe instantly vaporized by the heat of its passage. The shot finally disappeared underwater, then the ship rocked with the impact of the plasma shell turned torpedo.

Maritius watched himself trying to fix the broken Intimidator and saw, finally, the carrier slowly turn and lumber out to see, the rest of the fleet going with it. He sighed deeply, leaned slowly back, and fell over, finally resting.


	9. Gettysburg Revisited

"We gather here today in remembrance," Maritius began. Those waiting beneath him were piloting vehicles and K-bots or standing near vehicles that had carried them there, most with surfaces still dented and broken from the battle. They stood, arrayed around Maritius, as he stood on top of the hill where he'd landed a few days earlier as conqueror. He stood at the base of his command suit and spoke in the open air to the forces arrayed beneath him. "We gather to remember those who gave their lives in the struggle for this," he swept an arm toward the sea, gesturing over the wreckage of the Core base. Some of the damage had been inflicted by the ARM, and some by the Core as they were pulling out, detonating preset charges to keep the ARM from getting any designs from their construction facilities.

"What we did three days ago, my friends, was nothing short of a miracle. Against an overwhelming defense, our fledgling force managed to move in, destroy the Core, and drive them from this shore. They sustained heavy losses, and a great deal of production power was taken from them forever.

"But the losses we sustained were heavy as well. They were infinite, in fact. Because each life had an unlimited potential, and each and every death snuffed out that infinity. I mourn the loss of any one of my friends, killed by the Core, because we hold a different belief than they. We believe in the freedom to choose one's own path, and for that, so long ago, the killing began. And it hasn't stopped, not even now, when the simple reasons for our fighting have deteriorated into a fight for survival. Our fight for freedom has become a fight for freedom in its purest essence, the freedom to draw another breath. And the breaths of our comrades have been silenced, while the Core has only to reinstall a backup Pattern and their comrades go on living. If what they have can be called life . . .

"It was once said, in another war fought for freedom thousands of years ago, that nothing we living say can possibly consecrate the ground of a battlefield any more than the statement of those who died, the statement that their cause was such that they were willing to give up their lives that others might not make that choice. And so it is that I only confirm that this ground upon which we stand is hallowed in the collective memory of our fallen friends. We will be building a monument, by hand, stone by stone, to recognize their sacrifice, and to show our eternal appreciation for their dedication. I ask that we may fight all the more bravely for these fallen comrades, not only on Adriata, but all throughout the ARM's forces, and that their lives might not have been given in vain.

"And I hope that we can also assure that others in the ARM military will know that lives of our friends were not given in vain. Every minute of every day of every year, ARM soldiers are dying, fighting the Core, across a galaxy so immense that a human mind can barely grasp it. And for many of those soldiers, those deaths are entirely anonymous. For every Commander sent through a Galactic Gate, five others fail to gain a foothold strong enough that they can establish universal access through the gate. Five of every six ARM Commanders never returns. And the soldiers who fight and die under them disappear silently.

"Let us ensure that we return, back through the Galactic Gate, and when we go, let us bring with us stories to inspire the ARM forces throughout the galaxy. Go with strength, my friends."

Maritius climbed back into his suit and walked down the hill, heading east, away from the site of the battle and the old Core base. The ARM forces behind him slowly dissipated, some beginning the trudge back to the main ARM base, where the only living facilities on Adriata were still located. Others stayed, chatting with each other about friends, past and present. Still others wandered alone into the wreckage of the Core base, lost in their own thoughts.

Maritius trudged through the remains of the forest, walking through areas that had been green a few days ago, but were now charred. Black husks of trees reached from the ground like withered hands, and a thin layer of black ash covered everything. Rain clouds, inspired by the ash, had gathered the day after the fight to hang menacingly over the field, but hadn't yet released their loads of water. Ahead he could see the sharp line where all the construction aircraft, working frantically for a day and a half, had managed to contain the fire. But despite their best efforts, blackened and charred trunks surrounded him.

"Commander!" Maritius stopped and turned his suit slowly from the waist. He saw someone running towards him at a light jog, waving and calling on a radio frequency. He recognized Derek-16, and turned fully, crouching and climbing out of his suit. The damp ash tried vainly to billow around his legs as he stepped down onto the ground.

Derek-16 loped to a stop in front of Maritius, breathing steadily. "Commander. I wanted to thank you for your speech."

Maritius, slightly confused and generally irritable, strove to be gracious. "Thank you, Derek."

"It may give you pause that I, who lost few friends in battle, am thanking you. I wish no offense."

"I'm a bit confused, but certainly not offended."

"Well, it is just that, you see . . . hmm . . . how to explain . . . I have been having doubts." He glanced up quickly to watch Maritius' reaction while continuing. "Not about my allegiance, surely. I am very happy for all you've done for me, and I thank you again. But I've been having doubts as to whether I'd truly ever be able to understand why it is that I'm different. Different than human, and how I can become more human, a thing that I respect. And if I can't understand why I'm different, I'll never be able to change.

"You haven't changed me, sir. But you've helped."

Maritius nodded solemnly. He reached to put a hand on Derek's shoulder, but was interrupted by a movement over Derek's shoulder. He shut his eyes and interfaced with the command suit, zooming in and trying to pick out details. An Avenger, stripped of weaponry. Apparently being used as a long-range scout. "Hawks, scramble, we got a friend on the horizon."

A few standard clones had been in attendance in their aircraft at the memorial service, and Maritius and Derek turned to watch four stealth aircraft lift gently off the ground and lean back to scream upwards into the air. He lowered his head, content that the problem would be dealt with, and choosing for the moment to ignore the larger problem it presented; that they'd be found, or at least their general area would be, and production would need to commence immediately on a new base and new personnel. He stared at the ground between himself and Derek-16. A tiny green shoot, like a spark of life, was pushing up through the ash, only a few days after the fire had blackened the entire forest. He bent and pushed the ash away from around the tiny bud. He dug into the soft ground around the tiny plant and scooped it out.

"I think this will make a lovely beginning to our memorial," he said softly, staring at the fire of life as the first raindrops fell.

*****

A few days later, an exact week after the battle, Maritius found himself standing near the base of the galactic gate. At the base of Gate Hill, one of the squat underground construction vehicles he'd designed was preparing to go underground. It was to dig the first of a series of tunnels leading to the bones of the old Core base on the coast, where a new ARM presence was being constructed at break-neck speed.

Maritius nodded to the captain of the construction vehicle – its size and complexity made five operators necessary – who waved back from the cockpit of the monster, then issued a few terse commands. The digging apparatus on the front spun into life, the tracks of the vehicle rearranged themselves at points along the cylinder of the construction vehicle, and hydraulic systems tipped it slightly as it nosed toward the ground. With a shower of dirt, ground was broken on the tunnel leading out to Beachside, the new ARM base.

Maritius had parked his command suit in the clearing behind the Advanced Vehicle plant that served as a garage and was just heading to the cafeteria when a comm call itched at the back of his skull. He answered it with a quick "yup?"

"Hey Maritius, Mary here. I got an interesting request today from someone, and I was wondering if I could talk it over with you."

Maritius walked on, a bit puzzled at Mary Jennings' cryptic approach. "Uh, sure. I was just heading in for some lunch. You wanna eat with me?"

"I already ate, but I'll meet you there. Northwest corner, it's usually pretty deserted."

Maritius clicked the channel shut and strolled into the cafeteria. He grabbed a tray and moved through the line in the small anteroom, greeting people as he moved past and joking with one of his Hawk pilots who was starting to show her pregnancy. He grabbed a drink at the end of the line and walked out, trying to call up a mental map of the base and figure out the northwest corner, finally giving up and just looking for Mary. He spotted her, back to the wall in the far corner of the room, and trotted over.

"Reconstituted beans, very obviously 'lathed steak, soggy bread, and I don't even know what this is," Maritius said, poking at the third container on his plate. He picked up an apple and sunk his teeth into it. "At least we've got some decent fruit," he said around the bite. Mary chuckled gamely, then sipped at her drink. "So, what's the deal?" Maritius asked, slouching and putting his feet up on the opposite bench.

"Well, Janet Donix came to me the other day. She seemed a little nervous about it, but she let me know that she was pregnant . ."

"Oh, yeah! Great! I was just talking to that Hawk pilot in there, she's startin' to show. We're gonna have some kids around here in . . ."

"Yeah, point is, Maritius, they're worried."

Maritius stopped for a moment, forked another bite of steak, and chewed thoughtfully. "'Bout what, in particular."

"Well, starting a family, that's a big deal. And it gives people a bit of a different perspective. They're a little worried about being on the front line, and Janet asked me if maybe she could get moved to Red Hills or Hillside. She said she knew it was totally inappropriate, but was just hoping we'd think about it."

Maritius thought for a moment longer. "Front line? It's all the front line . . ."

"Yeah, alright, this whole planet is the front line. But the thing is, Maritius, the scope of our battle here is changing, right?" Maritius didn't answer, and Mary went on. "To defeat the base that was out at Beachside, we emptied the whole damn base, because if that didn't work, we wouldn't have had a chance for survival anyway. Well, that's not true anymore. Now, if we fail an attack, a counterattack might wipe out a base, but there's three more out there to take the brunt."

Maritius nodded, agreeing with Mary. "Alright, I'm with your strategic logic, but I'm slow. I don't see where we're headed yet."

"Okay, sure. Say we find another Core base in the south, that we have to attack within a week for strategic purposes. You tell me what we'd do."

Maritius thought for a moment, but only a moment. The strategic answer was nearly reflex. "Well, full production from Beachside and Adriata city, and then we'd empty those two cities of ground forces. Maybe leave a little picket behind. Leave some air cover as well. And we'd borrow half the defenses from Hillside and Red Hills, and probably put those in Adriata City, maybe a few in Beachside."

Mary nodded. "Exactly. People from Red Hills wouldn't go into battle."

"Oh . . ." Maritius stated. Then his expression hardened. "So she's effectively asking to be relieved of duty."

"No. But she is asking to be assigned to a less dangerous duty."

"Alright, there is a difference, I'll admit. But by what right does she put someone else in harm's way?"

"By the same right that you put anyone in harm's way, Maritius. Defense of life." Maritius stopped short. "Think about it. Obviously, because of justice and duty, we can't give in to her request. At least not explicitly. But think about it, sir. If we don't at least try to help out our foothold on life here on Adriata – if we just use the standard assignment roster and end up orphaning children in the process – we won't really be helping things at all." She looked up at Maritius to see if her words were having an effect and drove forward with her argument. "Now I'm not telling you I know what to do. I don't have the answers at all. But we've got to think of some way to help out the families that we've got coming. And there's a few people who could really use a break after that battle, too. Private Subreman's one under my command, he hasn't been the same since he lost his squad in the raid."

Maritius speared another piece of steak and chewed the rubbery meat, slowing as a thought took hold. "Hey Mary . . . what color would you say Janet's thumb is?"

Mary cocked her head. "Huh?"

"You'll see."

*****

Ryan Storough pulled the helmet off gingerly, then tugged the plug out of the base of his skull. He shook his head rapidly and rubbed the fatigue from his eyes. "Alright, nice job folks. No simulator work tomorrow; we spent way too long tonight as it is." Ryan said his goodbyes to his squad as he walked out of the simulator and headed toward the entrance to the living quarters.

A faint light caught his attention, and he turned toward the Production Quarter, where most of the factories and repair facilities were located. In truth, it was much more than a quarter, practically the northern two-thirds of Adriata City. The above-ground cafeteria, the under-construction train station, the medical station, and a few of the older living quarters were the only other things above-ground in the rest of the city.

Storough turned toward the repair facility where a blue computer-glow was coming from under the entrance door, and a bit through the heavily tinted window in the door. People were allowed anywhere in the base, of course, and there was nothing wrong with anyone being the repair facility; that was where the unit design computers had been placed. The workstations there were open all day and night, and people were welcome to try their hand at building new units for the ARM's war against the Core machines. But few people ever did, and no one did at two in the morning.

Ryan walked up to the door and peered through, but the window was shielded to let very little light through, for blackout and air raid purposes. Aside from the glow that told him one of the workstations was active, and that a shadow partially blocked it, he could see nothing. He pushed the door open and walked in quickly.

Derek-16 turned to look at the door, deftly manipulating the keys with his hands as he looked at Storough. "Good evening, Captain Storough," he said cordially, while continuing to minimize unit designs from his screen.

"Evening," Ryan said, glancing quickly at the screen. There were multiple windows open, and Storough recognized few of the units. He caught a glimpse of what he though was a Fido with wings, and another modified Zipper. The last thing to close was a schematic of the Big Bertha super-heavy artillery piece.

Derek spun his chair to look at Ryan after he closed the last window, the screen showing only the innocent blue desktop of the design computers. "You don't use the cerebral jack?" Ryan asked, trying to make conversation while he figured out a way to figure out what the Core android had been doing.

"No, sir, I don't," Derek answered. "While it would be more efficient, and I am certainly more skilled with it, I want to try typing." Ryan nodded absently, and Derek continued. "While learning typing was very simple, trying to understand the demands of the interface are much more difficult. I think that I do not have the, uh, mindset of a human. I'm unused to the way that someone with fingers would interact with a computer. I view this as a sort of humanity training," he finished with a wry smile.

"You working on anything good?" Ryan asked. It was a leading question, but he could think of nothing better at the moment. It was late, and his brain was addled from multiple simulated deaths.

"A few things." Derek answered simply.

"I saw a Fido in there," Ryan stated.

"Ah yes. I had designed a unit with a conscious attempt at emulating the Fido, and now that I have access to the full ARM schematics, I thought I'd just adapt it. My design was inferior in a number of respects."

"What's yours do?"

"It is not quite finished yet."

Ryan stared at Derek for a moment, finally realizing that he wouldn't get anything out of this robot. "Night," he said, and turned to leave. Derek watched him go, then turned back to his work.

*****

"I know you trust him . . ." Ryan answered, somewhat irritably.

"Yes, I do," Maritius answered, sitting at his dining room table across from Ryan Storough. Neither had touched the beers that Maritius had gotten for them when Ryan entered fifteen minutes earlier.

". . . but if you made a mistake, your single error shouldn't condemn this whole base to treachery."

"You don't have any proof, Ryan."

"Yes, but I do have suspicions, and there's quite a bit of circumstantial evidence, sir." He held up fingers as he ticked off points. "First off, he's in the design lab late at night, when there won't be as many people around."

"He's a Pattern, Ryan. He doesn't sleep."

"Sure, but there's no reason he couldn't be there during the day. Two, he's interfacing manually with the computer, and you _know_ that keystroke logs and visuals logs are a lot tougher to trace or wade through than a simple jack-in trace. I know he gave me an excuse for that, but it could just be an excuse. And third, what was on the bottom? The bottom window, therefore the first thing opened, was the Big Bertha! Is it just coincidence that he had quite a few windows open and the first one happened to be the ARM's super-heavy artillery design? I mean, we'd love to get our hands on the latest iteration of the Intimidator schematics.

"I think he's changed. Patterns aren't simply machines, Ryan, they can think and feel. And out of contact with the Central Consciousness, there's none of the digital thought control going on."

"You don't know that, Maritius!" Ryan protested. "And besides, let's assume for a moment that you're right, and out from under Big Brother he's developed emotions, and desires and wants and goals. Who's to say that they're in line with ours? Couldn't it also be the case that he's developed emotions, and he misses someone back in the Core? And what a coup it would be if he brought them the schematics on the Big Bertha, so they'd plug him back into their machine?"

Maritius sighed, reached for the beer he hadn't touched, and left it alone, feeling how warm it had become. "So, what do you want me to do?"

"I think we should search his internal memory. See if he's got any schematics stored in there."

"No," Maritius answered quickly. "Absolutely not. There could be legitimate reasons for any schematics stored in there. He could want to review them away from the design workstations. And that's a total betrayal of his rights. It's impossible for us to review any full humans in that way, and I'm not going to subject him to a memory search just because we can."

Ryan heaved a sigh and leaned back. "There has to be some way we can confirm this. Subject his log-in on the design workstations to some scrutiny."

"He could bypass it easily, I'm sure."

"But he wouldn't if he has all that 'goodwill' you're always touting," Ryan answered sarcastically.

Maritius pointedly ignored the tone. "Alright, that's a good point. I'll institute a base-wide policy of tracking logins on the production computers, and if he's above board, there should be no problems. But that's where I'm drawing the line."

"Just keep and eye on him," Ryan said, standing up. "That's all I ask."

"Agreed." Maritius picked up his beer as Ryan left, grimaced at his first swig, then steeled himself and finished it off. He shook his head sadly before turning back to the research he'd been involved in, working late into the night.


	10. New Paths and Old Ways

"Four vamps?" Maritius asked. "That's it? Four vamps?"

"That's it, sir," Mark Ryu answered.

"I find that very difficult to believe."

"I do too, sir, but that's all that our patrols have encountered."

"Nearly a week since a very large, experimental prototype escaped a battle with us, and they haven't sent any more than four planes looking for us," Maritius marveled.

"That we've found," Jennings mentioned.

"That we've found," Maritius repeated. "They could be doing high-atmosphere overflights," _Something__ is seriously wrong with the Core on this planet_, Maritius thought, and not for the first time. "We should've been wiped out long ago." The others on his command staff simply looked at him. He glanced up under the weight of their stares and continued. "I mean, the only possible strategy to defend against an incursion through a Galactic Gate is to crush the invaders as soon as they're discovered. With 'lathing techs, every minute makes any invasion stronger. And they've let us get a toehold."

"Maybe they think we've established enough of a presence that they can't overwhelm us," Storough stated, adding 'sir' as an afterthought.

"Well, they would've needed more than four vamps to figure that out. I think we've been lucky. But we can't be complacent." Maritius stood up, signaling the end of the meeting. "Continue following the building protocols as planned, and let's get some extra coastal defenses at Beachside put up. Oh, Dobson, you and Ryu work up a proposal about a string of Sentinel watchtowers along the coast. Nothing overwhelming, I just want a bit of firepower, a lot of electronic eyes, and enough radar that we can spot things headed inland.

Dobson and Ryu nodded, and the four began filing out of Maritius' room. "Mary, could you stay behind a moment?" Mary Jennings stopped and turned, smiling the faint smile of a subordinate who wonders if there's a good reaming on the way. "Have a seat. Another drink?"

"No, thank you, sir," Jennings said politely.

"I've been thinking about what you said, Mary. About Janet Donix and Pvt. Subreman. And them needing a rest, and a place to protect this little bit of real life we've got going on Adriata." Maritius paused for a few moments, taking a pull from his beer, then violently shifted mental gears.

"You know, I've always liked natural clones more." Jennings blinked rapidly at her Commander. "Just in a strategic sense, mind you. All Commanders feel that way, really. Naturals are more versatile, can change vehicles, that sort of thing. Standard clones have androids that need maintenance, have to be replaced, all that." Maritius slowed to a halt, realizing the turn he'd taken. "But we need some more babies around here. I'm the only person on this planet with a belly-button, after all." He chuckled.

Maritius turned away from Jennings and leaned back into the couch, flicking on his wall screen with a nudge of his neural link. Overflight imagery of relatively thick second-growth jungle came on the screen, with the green overlay of the foundation plans of buildings. It was a standard view for a base in progress or planned, but this base was less dense and boasted far fewer defenses than a standard ARM military installation.

"Should I guess what that is?" Mary asked slowly.

"Only if you want to," Maritius answered.

"Not entirely," Jennings responded.

"Alright. That's Sylvanwood. 'S the new farm I'm going to build."

Jennings cocked her head to one side and glanced at Maritius from the corner of her eye. "Do I see what you're getting at, here, sir?"

Maritius shrugged. "Probably." He jumped from the couch and the image zoomed out as he moved, showing Sylvanwood's placement in relation to the rest of the ARM presence on Adriata. There were a few new elements in the overall map as well. "So, there's the tunnel running out to Beachside, which will be complete in a few days. And there's the road running up toward the mine. I'm going to run a train route along that as well. And then here, about a hundred miles north of Adriata City and fifteen miles off that train route," Maritius poked the wall screen, "is going to be Sylvanwood.

"I don't want it right on the train route, because I want it to be a little tough to get to. I mean, we'll have a road and all, sure, but I don't want high-speed transport right up to the door step." The image zoomed back in on the plan for Sylvanwood. "It'll be sort of a farm commune, I'm thinking. Some housing apartments above ground here, and more below ground here. This is the main cafeteria and the theater, in this building . . ."

"Theater?" Jennings asked.

"Yeah, well. Holos, wall-movies, plays, performances. Whatever." He grinned at Jennings and barreled on. "Machine shop here, tractor shed over here, here's the barn, here's the feed stalls and most of the animal pens over here. We'll have a genetics lab here, alongside the animal pens, and that'll have some of the thawing equipment we need for the flora and fauna. And then we'll have to have a command station, of course, and that goes over here. There are some more defenses to be put in, but they'll all be stationary."

"So, this is your idea of a resort?" Jennings asked, a mild retort in her voice.

Maritius turned, crestfallen. "You don't like it?"

Jennings grinned, "It's wonderful. Any place for standard clones to park?"

"Ooo, good point. Not enough room in the vehicle shed for them. Have to make underground parking, with some light repair facilities."

"Vehicle shed. You mentioned that before. There's gonna be tractors?"

Maritius nodded. "Small repair and medical nanolathes only in Sylvanwood. After these structure are built, there won't be a C-bot or vehicle in Sylvanwood ever again, if I have anything to say about it. I want this place as 'au natural' as I can get it without endangering anyone. Everything should be done by sweat and toil, where it can be."

"So, you've figured out all the moral issues involved with sending some soldiers off to grow apples and others to fight the Core?" Jennings asked.

"Not at all! By the way, I'm delegating to you to select the first command staff." Jennings glared at Maritius. "You're welcome. Now get crackin'."

*****

Derek-16 woke with a start. He did not 'wake' in the sense that others in the ARM base would have, but instead came to a state of full alertness. Neither he nor the android that housed him needed sleep, but Derek found that if he enforced a few hours of immobility every night, it helped his perspective on humanity. He also took these times to devote full attention to various concepts he was learning.

He was in the midst of researching the concept of 'honor' when he heard something familiar in the distance. The familiarity of it shocked him so deeply that he was running at full processor speed almost instantly, and immediately began tracking the sound's source while thinking about its possible consequences.

He realized soon that he hadn't heard the sound through his ears, but digitally. There was an echo of the Core Central Consciousness running through the datanet of the ARM base.

Derek-16 immediately recoiled in shock, his body leaping to the headboard of his small bed, and his mind attempting to mask itself into the code of the datanet, hiding from the invader. He cautiously probed along the 'net, trying to get more information about this trace of the CCC.

_There_. The path was plain. The rudimentary radars of the Sentinels guarding Adriata City could be plotted as individual points in a very large radar array, and a pair of core satellites were transmitting broad waves to hack into the ARM base. The bandwidth was miniscule, which was why Central Consciousness could barely send a tendril into the datanet. But that meant the Core knew the location of Adriata City, and they might find traces of Derek-16 in the datanet. While he tried to make himself as unobtrusive as possible to allow the ARM AI's to go about their tasks, his programming was nonetheless vastly different from what the ARM 'net's architecture was used to. His tracks were all over the 'net.

_Do I tell Maritius?_ Derek-16 thought. _He has been kind, and I have been happy. I think._ But there were those that doubted Derek's sincerity, and they had Maritius' ear. If any intrusion was discovered, they would be quick to point out that the Central Consciousness had not found its way to Adriata City until a Pattern arrived. _So these are the sorts of problems honor seeks to solve._

Derek's lip curled in the way that he'd learned meant distaste and he said, "I should have studied these concepts more thoroughly."

*****

Jennings found Maritius three days later in Beachside, toiling in the shadow of his parked Command suit. He and another man, a Flash driver, were using a rudimentary A-frame crane to manhandle a large chunk of rock into position on top of a slowly growing wall.

"What's all this?" Jennings called as she walked up.

Maritius didn't turn as he brought the heavy load slowly down into position, but only grunted a momentary reply. After it was seated and both men decided that more chiseling was necessary for a good fit, he paused his work and turn to Major Jennings. "We've decided on a building plan for the memorial. It's in the basic pattern of the cathedrals of the Lost Age. Turns out we've got some scholars and architects on the staff here." Maritius gestured lazily towards a tall, lanky man who was directing a small work crew from a set of instructions on the datapad in his palm. "You needed to talk?"

"Well, I've decided on the command staff at Sylcanwood. Wanted to double-check with you and see if they were all alright."

"As long as you didn't put yourself on there, I'm sure it'll be fine," Maritius said with a wink. Then he pulled himself up short. "You didn't, did you?"

"No, sir, I didn't," Jennings said with indulgence as she handed over a datapad.

Maritius scanned it quickly, then handed it back. "Looks good. I think the Head of Agriculture should be an independent position, not under the Head Geneticist. We want the farmer to have some freedom from the scientist, no? And I don't think you need a position each for Flora and Fauna. Fold those into Head of Agriculture and then make someone something else."

"Like what?"

"I dunno. Mm, someone concerned with the natural state of things. Green police. Making sure there's none of the modern conveniences up there. Director of Roughing It."

"Environmentalist? Conservationist?"

"Great, one of those. Oh, and you don't need to sketch out the support staffs for each of those positions."

Jennings looked thoughtful as she tapped commands into the datapad. "Well, I just wanted people to have an idea of what they needed. Just suggestions, but I thought they'd be some guidelines."

Maritius stopped what he was doing and looked at her, unconsciously putting on his air of command. "Your instincts were right; you should always try to foresee any problems your subordinates will have before they run into them. But only give them the answers after they ask for them. One of the great rules of command. 'Never tell people how to do things. Tell them what to do and they will surprise you with their ingenuity'."

"Now that last part couldn't have been yours, it was far too succinct."

Maritius guffawed once. "Nope, not I. General George S. Patton, Jr., United States Army."

"Who what and where?"

"One of the original tank commanders of the Lost Age. Pretty much the first one who figured out what to do with armored cavalry, in fact, besides his nemesis."

"Does Storough know about him?"

"Well, half of our tank manual owes its strategies to the two of 'em, whether Storough - or the manual's authors - knows it or now. Patton was the one who first fought against the Flash rush, but they called it something else back then."

"How do you know all of this?" Janet asked.

"Second rule of command. Know more than your subordinates . . ."

"Third rule is never tell them how?" Jennings asked with a smile.

"You're catching on quick." Maritius turned and sat himself on the growing wall and surveyed the growth of the Memorial Cathedral. Foundational work was complete and the walls were growing around the large, semi-circular sun room that was going to be the end of the cathedral. In the center of it, the tree that he himself had planted had grown to a young whip-strength stalk of four feet. "Now, the thing that I do not know, and would love it if any of my subordinates did, is why in the name of all the Gates hasn't the Core attacked us yet?"


	11. Through the Veil

The narrow ravine was filled with balls of glowing plasma, super-heated laser fire, the scream of metal, and piles of smoldering wreckage. It looked like some madman's conception of one of the lower circles of Hell, crossed with a demolition derby where contestants were encouraged to bring heavy weaponry. In many ways, it was.

The Core Commander was stationed at the head of the ravine, right where the land flattened and widened into the steep-sided valley that was his last major production facility. The hills around the valley were riddled with caverns, mineshafts, and more production facilities, as well as various escape routes. Those routes had long since emptied out, small squads of two or three light tanks and K-bots escorting single construction vehicles or K-bots to new locations, to metastasize the Core presence. The Commander knew all this because he'd ordered it, and because their movements geographically were still linked digitally into the dataweb of his base. He also knew that, if this base fell, he would fall defending it. And that would be the end of his faction's presence on the planet.

The pair of Punishers on one side of the ravine lashed out, the pair on the opposite side firing out a moment later. A Can dissolved under their fire, turning into so much smoldering metal and expanding gas. A Raider nearby was damaged into immobility, and the Goliath behind it, its bulk taking up nearly the entire ravine, began firing straight into the Raider, soon reducing it to wreckage and then rolling it under its treads.

"All Punisher batteries, single shots at highlighted target. Aim for immobility." If that Goliath could be destroyed, the heavy tank would block the offensive effectively until a construction vehicle could reclaim it. And some of the light laser towers, mounted laterally higher up the ravine, could cover those approaches and effectively halt the attack. The valley, although open to the sky, was loaded with so many missile towers well-hidden in the higher mountains that an air attack was out of the question. The ravine rose over five hundred feet and nearly touched at the top, making an air attack almost impossible.

"Sir, Orthodox air units approaching." Or, perhaps it wasn't.

"Scramble three Vamps down the ravine."

"Yessir," the digital assistant responded before flitting off into the datanet to alert the Vamp pilots that they had been volunteered for martyrdom.

The Goliath, hammered by the Punishers, shuddered to a stop. The Commander performed an approximation of an unpleasant grin as he watched a small mixed squad of K-Bots, mostly Thuds and AK's, scramble up or around the corpse of the super-heavy tank and begin firing back down into the area that was now a parking lot full of Orthodox Core units. The spotless white of the Commander's own units, with the painted red flames licking up their legs, stood out sharply against the deep brown earth and occasional green scrub of the ravine. And blended easily into the bright red and white explosions of plasma and missile fire. More K-bots were streaming out of cave entrances high up in the ravine and joining the fight.

The Orthodox air units were confirmed now. Air transports, carrying bomb units. The Commander suddenly understood. He'd guessed rightly that his erstwhile Commander would not be able to resist sending in his super-heavy units, Cans, Sumos, and Goliaths, which was why he'd chosen this base - with this sharp ravine - for his last stand. But he'd forgotten that as much as he liked heavy units, he liked large explosions more. The three Vamps screamed down the trench, taking the sharp turns at dangerous speeds. Most likely they were too late.

The Commander watched his three air units round the major corner that marked his best defense and watched, too, as two of them dissolved into sparks and paint chips as missile fire ripped into them. The third had avoided the first salvo and loosed his missiles at some unseen enemy.

Two air transports came into sight around the corner. One was trailing flame and diving towards the ground, and hit with a small explosion that barely shuddered the earth. The other, judging by the heat signature, was mere seconds away from imploding its plasma tanks and starting the explosion that would trigger the bomb. What units he had left in the ravine all opened fire on the transport that was dropping towards the shattered bulk of the Goliath, to tear it apart and open the way up the ravine again.

Two shots hit home, then three more, but it was too late. The sinking transport hit the Goliath just as it detonated. Perfect timing by the pilot. The smaller explosion of the transport triggered the bomb and the Commander inadvertently threw a hand over his faceplate – a disturbingly human reaction – as the explosion ripped out. He glanced back at what used to be a Goliath and his main force of K-bots, now an empty hole in the ravine. The side of the canyon were ripped open, as was the floor. And here the Commander grinned again at the error of his adversary. There was a groan, louder than any of the explosions that had preceded it, as the shaken earth chose to settle to a more comfortable position. K-bots and vehicles began speeding back out of the ravine as either wall, weakened by the blast, began collapsing inward. First a few clumps of dirt shaken free by the blast and the movement, then the whole wall came crashing in toward itself, meeting in a landslide that piled hundreds of feet high and covered most of the ravine. The Commander stood his ground as the dirt cascaded towards him, finally rolling in an almost gentle wave to cover his feet. He looked left and right, saw the crazily-canted barrels of his Punisher artillery where the mounts had been torn from the ground, or the turrets had been ripped off.

He turned from the scene and began strolling back into the base. He called for his favorite lieutenant on the datanet. "Begin build protocol three, sub A. Heavy on the K-bots." Another of his lieutenants tapped on his digital shoulder. "What is it? Good news, I hope."

"Yessir. Our discussion of three days ago . . ?"

The commander replayed the recording quickly. The command team had been lamenting the fact that, when Core fought Core, unit strengths and weaknesses were all too well-known. New units were needed, but his small force lacked the originality and brilliance for truly great unit design. "Noted. Proceed."

"Our satellites have detected a presence on the planet. An ARM presence. And there is a Core pattern with them."

The Commander thoughtfully called up more processing power. "An ARM presence. True Humans. We'll have to see if we can capture a few, then. Fresh Patterns would be just the thing for new units. Excellent . . ."

*****

Since its first gentle touch two days earlier, Derek-16 had twice more felt the presence of a Core program probing in the Arm datanet. Always faint, always vague, and never with even the weak strength of its first visit. After the second contact, he had decided on a course of action. After the third contact, he had enough astronomic information to make inferences about the placement and orbits of the satellites that were being used to make the contact. With that information, he had created a table projecting the likelihood of further visits.

So he waited in the unit design facility. It was deep in the night of Adriata, and save for the troops on night watch, no one was stirring. He sat at the workstation in the repair facility, manipulating the keyboard with his fingers as he'd become accustomed to doing, but with the cerebral jack in the back of his skull to keep him in the closest possible contact with the datanet.

The design for a long-range search and rescue vehicle were springing up under his fingers when he felt the first whisper of a Core presence, like the first touch of wind on a dense, hot summer evening. He was so startled that he jumped, and was momentarily pleased by the humanity of the action, before focusing quickly back on his task. His fingers flew over the keyboard, closing and saving the design files and opening up the programs he had been designing during the past two nights.

With the cerebral jack he commandeered the processing power of all of the unit design workstations. His eyes absently noticed the intense glow as all six workstations around the room suddenly lit up. His focus began to split, spreading fractally down and out, splitting his consciousness across innumerable tasks. In truth, the Pattern called Derek-16 was really only handling the upper few layers of the tasks. These included, first and foremost, handling a complex camouflage program he had written. It was ponderous and unwieldy, but with it he was convinced that he could trundle about the dataweb and be completely indistinguishable from another large data packet or program. He had long ago warned the ARM AI's of his presence and been accepted. None of them would be tricked by the disguise, but they would accept his being there.

The Core presence was stronger this time. Not enough to affect any changes, but enough that an autonomous program could begin sniffing around the dataweb, looking for information or weaknesses. The program gingerly spread out from the central radar node, where the information from the missile towers was all compiled and sorted through. It slipped through the ARM digital defenses unseen to anyone or anything but Derek-16, who knew just what he was looking for.

He focused in on the program, keeping his camouflage adapted with a major portion of his mind, sensing rather than directing all the myriad other computations and communications that were necessary to keep him functioning in the dataweb. An idle alarm warned him; the computers were heating up. Even with six of them in sequence and slaved to his body's processors, he was pushing them beyond their limits.

The Core data loomed in front of him on the dataweb now. He knew how such programs would be built. He had even built many of them himself in his time as a Director both when he was in contact with Central Consciousness and when he wasn't, in attempts to get back in touch. He knew the Core codes inside and out, literally, and he had spent the rest of the last two nights writing a parasite program that, he hoped, would piggyback on the Core program and, every time it made contact with the ARM base, bring back information. It was an easy task, and a simple program, and it was the work of a moment for Derek-16 to slide up to the Core automaton program and insert his own code. He watched with satisfaction as it latched on to the bits of interface code left in the Core programming and melted in.

Now to the third part of his plan, the riskiest to himself and to his friends. The Core program was riding a ridiculously small bandwidth, a few megabytes at best. His program could only hijack a miniscule portion of that bandwidth to bring its information back into the ARM base or it would be detected. So he had decided that he had to help the Core, in order to help the ARM.

Derek-16 pushed his own slaved processors even further and, using the digital defenses of the dataweb itself, began to shepherd the program through a series of traps that he had laid. These traps pointed out holes in the ARM digital defenses, ways that the dataweb itself could be warped by the Core to allow greater access. Greater access meant greater bandwidth, and greater vulnerability. Derek-16 had realized that, along with opening these holes, he was shouldering the task of keeping them guarded and safe. But this was the risk he had to take if he was to get any useful information, and have anything that he could show Maritius as proof of his good intentions.

First one, then two more of the computers gave out. He sniffed and smelled smoke in the room. No matter, it was finished. The last of the traps sprung, he launched his final program, and heavy defensive program that was to the standard defenses as a Maverick was to a Peewee on the battlefield. The Core program knew it was outclassed and retreated, slowly retracting up the radio waves and into the sky, stitching the holes that it had caused to makes its passage invisible. A circuit breaker in the repair facility tripped, and the room was plunged into darkness.

Derek-16 looked around the room in the repair facility in the near-blackness. He sniffed once, smelled the burning plastic of the charred solid state electronics. He realized that he was truly tired, at least mentally, and he heaved himself out of the chair and carried himself off to bed.

*****

The Core Commander was awakened by a signal nearly as old as the Core itself. It jarred him from his half-processes as a baby's cry would awaken its mother. It was not a distress signal, but it was a frequency and a series of codes so ancient as to be almost holy to the Core. All around him he felt his entire base startled into full wakefulness by its broadcasting.

"What is it?" he asked in a flat, menacing growl that rumbled across his base's small dataweb. His lieutenants shook themselves and rushed to decipher the message.

"It's a message from the other Commander. The Orthodox commander." The lieutenant could barely believe it. "He wishes to arrange a meeting."

"When?"

"Now, sir. Coordinates and passcodes are given. As well as datapoints for our own security to lock in."

"Make it happen," the Commander responded, then launched himself fully into the dataweb. So, the Orthodox Commander wanted a meeting? It was unlikely that he was going to gloat over his impending victory. And even if he was, the collapse of the ravine has simply given the Commander more time to make good his final defenses. Who knew? Maybe if enough forces were beaten back, he could escape with a force that could start another base.

He was millions of datapoints away from the location the Orthodox Commander had given when he first saw evidence of the meeting point. The dataweb was alive with thousands of Patterns and other digital presences, all belonging to his own True Believers and all rushing towards the datapoints he'd been given. As he got closer, he saw the meeting point as the enormous, dense mass of data that it was.

There, thousands of Orthodox units reinforcing their own security precautions, layering anti-trace proxies in, setting up checkpoints across I/O nodes, establishing waypoints for pull-out procedures. His own True Believers were doing the same. And there, from another quadrant, he saw Patterns of the Society as well. So, this was to be a meeting of all three factions. Something serious was happening.

The Commander of the True Believers reached the camp that his Patterns had set up anticipating his arrival. His Pattern was augmented with any number of baffles, enhancers, and add-ons, and he was sent in towards the datapoint. First a checkpoint of his own faction. Then an Orthodox checkpoint, where he was scanned and milliseconds were spent while his lieutenants haggled with the Orthodoxs Patterns over which augmentations his Pattern could keep and which he could not. Then through a checkpoint of the Society. Another of his own. Another Orthodox, this time with less haggling as precedents were set. Another of the Society. So on and so on, proceeding ever closer through a shifting, disorienting maze until, finally, he reached the center.

The Orthodox Commander was seated at a small round table, the red and black of his Command suit marking his faction. Next to him sat the commander of the Society, a Pattern that inhabited an Advanced Construction K-bot, detailed in blue and white. The K-bot had been scaled up so that, crouching at the table, its scale was consistent with the two Commander suits. Another detail that must have been haggled about, the Believer Commander thought wryly.

The Orthodox Commander gave no preamble. "ARM units have been detected on the planet. We must join forces to destroy them. We cannot risk the Gate."

Well, that was one advantage gone, thought the Believer Commander. They know of the ARM as well. "How do you know of the ARM presence?" he asked.

The Orthodox Commander. "An experimental facility on the western shore of continent D was destroyed. The experimental ship escaped and reported."

"I have been conducting flyovers as well," the Society K-bot intoned.

"Very well. I will consent to an end to this war to fight the ARM menace." The other two commanders seemed vaguely shocked, and the data around them rippled slightly. "My conditions are that you step down from command of your Orthodox units and fold them in with my True Believers. You will remain imprisoned until we can find out how to re-activate the gate and you can be sent to stand trial on Core Prime for your treasons."

The Orthodox Commander exploded from his chair. "The only treasons here are yours and those of your Heretic scum!" he bellowed. "I will not have my efforts to uphold the Core's missions defamed by the likes of you!"

"It was your experiments that closed the gate, and your laxness that has allowed the ARM to spread unchecked so far on this planet," retorted the Believer Commander. "Continent D is your domain! We have no units there."

"I had a base there until recently, Believer. Your rage blinds you," answered the Society K-bot. "We of the Society wanted no part of this war, and have only defended ourselves when either of _you _has seen fit to attempt to roll us under your treads in your infernal march towards your mutual destruction!" The rage of the normally calm intellectual had a slight pacifying effect on the two warring Commanders, and they allowed him to continue.

"At issue is the fact that we have been out of contact with Central Consciousness for far too long. To solve this, we simply need to activate the Galactic Gate, march back to Core Prime, and be replaced here by fresh Patterns. We shall all stand trial for our actions here, and Central Consciousness will decide the right and wrong of them."

"We cannot activate the Gate. It is damaged," answered the Orthodox Commander.

"It is _not_ damaged!" the Society K-bot yelled back. "Our spies have infiltrated your base and run the diagnostics. It is in perfect working order! But your wars leave you without the necessary power to turn it on. If you would give the Society access to the Gate, this could all be settled."

"_Never!_" the Orthodox Commander leveled a digital finger at the Believer Commander. "As long as these Heretics poison this world, I will _never _activate the Gate. I will destroy it before allowing the taint of your treason to spread to other Core worlds."

"So blind are you that you would attack my forces over ARM forces on your own world. A wonderful job you've done with this command. If you were truly Core, you would be attacking the ARM. As I will be. I swear that it is by my hand that the ARM on this planet will be destroyed."

"And by my hand, I will destroy you along with the ARM units," the Orthodox Commander stated.

"You are both emotional imbeciles," the Society K-bot stated, the stinging insult whipping into the charged atmosphere. "While you are at each other's throats, the Gate will be re-opened, and the true Core units, those of Central Consciousness, will flow across this world and sweep all before them. If you help me with that goal, I will mention it when I recommend who among you is to be wiped. Because my conscience will be clean when I am once again submerged in the Central Consciousness. I doubt you two will be able to claim the same."

With that, the Society presence was gone, whipping out through all of the security with a speed that confirmed his faction's skill in preparing their defenses. Wordlessly, the two Commanders left the meeting point, vowed to continue their war against each other. The meeting had accomplished nothing but the addition of another combatant to the table.


	12. Tribunal and Exile

Maritius woke early and began poring over the reports that were stacking up in his inbox. He lounged in a giant recliner with a sparse breakfast he'd cooked himself, picking at it languidly while he dealt with reports through his cerebral jack.

The underground construction vehicle had finished the tunnel out to Beachside, and a crew of Jack Dobson's K-Bots was beginning the move through the tunnel, 'lathing the track and whatever support facilities the trains would need. Another of his crews had finished designing the prototypes for the above-ground track that would lead up to Hillside, the gargantuan mining facility that Derek-16 had directed. The team had taken Maritius' suggestion, and the support pylons were combined structural supports and missile towers. Intermittently along the routes were larger forts which combined repair facilities, switching yards for the trains, and enough armor and defenses that any train that was being harassed could hide there until the danger was over.

Red Hills, the base he'd founded when the rest of his friends went off to take Beachside, was progressing nicely and was going to be ready for human habitation soon. It was time for another supply run out there, as well, but he had subordinates to take care of that. Preliminary surveys showed a lot of geothermal power waiting to be tapped , which was good. Always better to use natural energy, and anything was less dangerous than fusion reactors.

His research teams had been busy, what with all of his troops having no combat for so long. An upgrade to the heavy armor systems on the K-bots had been designed, as well as a better reloading device for Guardians. A few new K-bots and vehicle designed had trickled in, but he shunted all of those over to Dobson to peruse before he'd have a final say on them. He noted a few of the names on many of the research reports, and flagged them all for further tracking to see if he could promote one to a leadership position and take some people out of combat duty. Jenning's discussion about preserving the spark of life on Adriata had taken its toll, and he was looking around to see where else he could strategically take people off the front lines. Of course, he reasoned, that meant he'd have to warm up another five hundred or so clones. He wished there were some more natural births on the way. Maybe increasing everyone's alcohol allotment would do something about that. Maritius chuckled to himself, then yawned and stretched.

An alarm chimed in the corner of his wall screen, and he glanced at it, then at the clock. 6:30. But it wasn't a full battle alarm. But way too early for any normal requests. Something strange was up. He set the plate to one side, sat back in his chair, and answered the call.

It was a uniformed officer, the lieutenant who'd been overseeing the night watch duties. "Morning, sir. Sorry to bother you."

"Not a problem, lieutenant. I was up. What's the problem?"

"Well, sir. Uh, there was a bit of a blip last night in the power grid. Something tripped a circuit breaker in the repair facility. And when we went to check it out . . . well."

Maritius was quickly losing the glow of his early productivity. "Spit it out, lieutenant."

"Three of the computers were fried. Looks like they overheated. The unit design computers. And my electronics specialist told me that nothing you could do on those workstations normally would fry them. Let alone work all of them hard enough to trip the circuit breaker."

"Have you checked the logs? Any names?"

"Yessir. Derek-16."

"Shit," Maritius pronounced.

*****

"If you mutter 'I told you so' even once, Major Storough, I will have your insubordinate ass in the brig so fast that it'll take your head three days to catch up to it. Do I make myself clear?"

"Yes, sir, Commander," Storough answered. He suppressed a grin from where he was walking behind his quickly-stomping Commander. Mary Jennings was flanking Maritius on the other side, and the three of them were followed by half a dozen guards armed with personnel EMP guns.

"I will tell you, both of you," he turned to glare at Jennings, "only once. The command staff will be conducting a military tribunal. I know that both of you are distrustful of this Pattern. You will not let that affect you. You will act as impartial judges, as befits your rank. After that judgment, we will pass sentence. And then we'll fix whatever god-damned mess this traitorous lump of metal caused."

"I begin to doubt your impartiality, sir," Jennings said with a smirk.

"Shut up," Maritius answered. They had reached the underground level where Derek-16 lived. Maritius stepped up to the door and knocked. No answer, nor any movement. Maritius looked up at the ceiling. "Computer, give me the location of the Pattern called Derek-16."

"In his room," the computer pronounced.

"Maybe he's asleep," Storough said.

"He's a Pattern and an android. Neither of those things has to sleep."

In truth, Derek-16 was asleep. The efforts of the night before had taxed him more than he knew, and the medical nanobots running through his android were repairing the taxed processors of the damage they took the night before. He was surprised to be roused from his torpor by the pounding on his door, and he rose from his small bed in the corner. He was dressed, as ever, in an unadorned version of the ARM Adriata military uniform, a sort of formal navy blue jumpsuit.

The door opened on Maritius, Major Jennings, Major Storough, and six armed guardsmen. Maritius did not look pleased. "Derek-16. I regret to inform you that you are under military arrest. You are suspected under the charges of treason and breaking the tenets of the Act for the Martial Good. You will be allowed to make statements in your own defense. Please accompany these men peacefully to the brig, where you will await your hearing."

Derek-16 was a Pattern, and didn't take very long to reach decisions. He saw the situation from his point of view, and saw how his actions of the night before must have looked. He also saw six armed guardsmen. "When is my trial?"

"As soon as you would like."

"Now would suit," Derek answered.

"Very well. Computer, summon Captain Dobson and Captain Ryu to the cafeteria, please." With that, Maritius turned and began wordlessly walking toward the lift out of the living quarters. Jennings and Storough followed him, then two guardsmen, another two guardsmen flanking the android, and two more following behind. The whole procession moved quickly to the cafeteria, where two low tables had been set up and a single chair faced them, all on the stage. Dobson and Ryu were already seated, but stood when Maritius entered the room.

"At ease," he muttered. Turning to the guardsmen, he said, "Gentlemen, please stand watch over the prisoner in the other room. Escort him in at the proper time." Maritius mounted the steps and took the central seat behind the table, flanked on either side by Jennings and Storough, the higher-ranking officers.

"So, does anyone need the evidence reviewed?" Maritius asked.

"Uh, yeah, I don't quite know what's going on," Dobson stated.

"This morning, three computers were found blown out in the unit design facility, and a circuit breaker tripped. The last person logged in on any of those computers was Derek-16. There were disturbances reported by our AIs all over the dataweb last night, some ranging as far as the rudimentary dataweb at Beachside. It's my conclusion, and it seems a logical one, that Derek-16 hijacked the design facility computers to increase his own processors, and went on a rampage last night, punching holes in the dataweb, possible to alert the Core or perhaps to get a message out to them, I don't really know. Web-tactics were never my strong suit."

"So, that's the evidence?" Ryu asked.

"It seems to me . . ." Jennings began.

Dobson cut her off sharply. "Mary, this is a Tribunal. I just want the evidence. Maritius, you will rein in your tongue and not espouse your theories, disrupting the impartiality of the rest of the members, or I will have you removed from this court, and possibly from command, as unfit." Storough turned and stared, wide-eyed, at Dobson, then back at Maritius, whose eyes had sharpened into mere slits of anger. Dobson didn't flinch. With a jaw clenched against a sharp retort, Maritius turned and bellowed, "Bring in the accused."

Derek-16 marched in between two armed guardsmen and sat himself in the chair. Maritius began the proceedings. "Derek-16, you have been charged with treason and breaking the Act for the Martial Good. Do you understand these charges?" Derek-16 rolled his eyes up and accessed both files on the web, skimming them in seconds. "Computer, please restrict Derek-16's web access for the remainder of these proceedings." The android looked at Maritius for a moment, then simply nodded.

"Yes, I understand the charges," the Pattern responded.

"How do you plead?"

"Not guilty," the Pattern answered.

"Very well," Maritius said. "Let's begin. Do you deny that you were in the design facility last night, at the time that three computers were pushed beyond their limits and a circuit breaker tripped?"

"No, I was there."

"And what were you doing there? Certainly not designing units, as is the purpose of that facility?"

"No, I was not, Commander," Derek-16 answered. The Pattern weighed his responses carefully. He had been studying humans since he was welcomed into Adriata City, but still he wasn't sure of their reactions to all situations. His skills in facial recognition were improving but were not as subtle as he would have liked in the circumstances. In this case, it seemed obvious that they thought him guilty. And since he had nothing to show them, no proof of the other Core program's presence, nor any proof from his piggyback program, there was nothing to point out that he was not guilty. It seemed there was little he could say.

"Would you like to enlighten us as to what you were doing?"

"I'm sorry to say that I cannot. But I assure you that it was for the good of the colony here." Derek-16's words sounded thin even to him.

"I'm sorry, but your assurances mean very little to us at the moment," Maritius said.

Captain Ryu cleared his throat, then spoke after being acknowledged by his Commander. "Derek, you are a stranger here, in this city and in this culture. You do know that, in light of this evidence, by failing to provide us with an answer that shows us you were not committing these acts, and by failing to answer the question any other way, you are giving us no choice but to assume that you committed these acts?"

"What acts are these, exactly?" Derek-16 asked, a sudden new course occurring to him. "The evidence before you shows that I was the last person in a room, at the time when three computers were destroyed. You seem to be extrapolating this to prove that some treasonous acts were committed on the dataweb, by me."

"Nothing but acts on the dataweb could have overloaded those computers," Jennings answered acidly.

"Acts on the dataweb, yes," Derek-16 answered. "Not treasonous ones, necessarily. The evidence you have is physical in nature only, and no one of you can possibly say what were my actions, or my intentions, that caused those three computers to be destroyed."

Maritius' jaw clenched again as he saw that the Pattern was right, and he had caught them in an obvious fallacy. "Very well, Derek-16. The old charges are dropped against you, and the new ones are these: treason and breaking the tenets of the Act for the Martial Good. Specifically, the destruction of Army property. How do you plead?"

Derek-16 thought for a moment, and then a moment more. The choice was a difficult one. It involved the concepts of _honor_ that he had been studying, but what was more, involved _trust, truth,_ and _justice_ as well. The Core knew of all these things, but their meanings for these humans were radically different. "Guilty," the Pattern stated.

"Very well. Guards, escort the prisoner from the room to await his sentencing."

"May I request that I be allowed to fix the computers I destroyed as part of my sentence?" Derek-16 asked as he rose to his feet.

"Duly noted. Thank you," Maritius answered. He watched as the android walked from the room, a guardsmen with a hand on each arm.

"Crap. He's got us on that point," Maritius answered.

"Look, he's still Core, and we can still do whatever we want with him. At what point did he cease to be a prisoner?" Storough asked. "I say we wipe him."

Maritius answered as the babble rose from the other three judges. "No, he's not a prisoner. He ceased to be a prisoner when I stopped treating him like one, and even if it's within the bounds of justice for us to treat him like a Core prisoner, I'm not going to, because _I _wouldn't feel right about it. So, he's pled guilty to treason and breaking the Act. But we obviously can't prosecute him to the fullest extent. Death is out. Imprisonment is even out."

"Why?" Jennings asked. "It's treason, he willfully destroyed Army property. Whatever he was trying to do on the dataweb is now moot."

"We can't kill him because that's forbidden under the Act," Dobson answered. "He pled guilty, and so the sentence cannot be carried to its fullest extent."

Maritius answered next. "And besides, I'm not going to imprison someone for this. First of all, he pled guilty. Secondly, he destroyed three computers that any of us could fix in ten minutes. If it was an AI, or a gun emplacement, or something like that, then maybe. But to prosecute someone so harshly under the Act for the Martial Good? No, that would make a mockery of the Act. I'm recommending to the Tribunal that we cut off his access to the dataweb indefinitely."

"I say we kick him out. Send him back to the Core," Storough said.

"That's the same as killing him!" Dobson protested. "You know they'd wipe his Pattern. Probably all copies of his Pattern across all worlds, because what he's done with us is unmistakably treason to the Core."

"What, then, just kick him out and not send him there? Send him off to scavenge for grubs in the woods?" Jennings protested.

"If we kick him out, we're condemning him to death. Eventually his android will break down, and without a mainframe to support his Pattern, he'll die," Maritius.

"Shucks," Storough began sarcastically. "You saying that he'll grow old and die like the rest of us?"

"Alright, this is enough," Maritius said, cutting off the conversation. "We can all agree that we need to cut off his web access, right?" The group nodded. "Good. Ryu, do you have anything to say? You've been quiet during the sentencing."

Ryu scratched at his cheek once, then took a sip from the glass of water in front of him. "You know, I've got to say, I've had my doubts about him. And I sure as shit didn't trust him when he first showed up. But this doesn't look like treason to me. This doesn't look like the work of a saboteur. Look, the Core practically lives in dataweb, or an equivalent of it. They can navigate the web the same as I'd get up to go to the bathroom, and our dataweb is a pale shadow compared to what they have. So why should whatever he did have been so sloppy? Why did it take so much more processing power than just his Pattern could give him? And why, of all things, did he let the evidence stay? It just doesn't add up. If he were going to screw us, why wasn't he _better_ at it than this?"

"Any number of things could've happened," Storough broke in. "Maybe he just isn't used to ARM digital architecture. Maybe something defensive happened and he had to respond to it, and it blew out the processors. Maybe . . "

Ryu rose his hand to silence him. "I'm not saying it proves his innocence. I'm just saying that it casts doubt on his guilt. I think restricting his web access is the right thing to do, and maybe even exile. But I've got my doubts."

"Alright. All those in favor of cutting off his web access." A 5-0 vote. "All those in favor of exile." Jennings and Storough were in favor. Dobson and Ryu were against it. Maritius heaved a sigh and stared at the ceiling, then muttered 'aye,' sealing the android's fate.

"What about his request? Letting him fix the computers?"

"No way," Jennings stated. "That's even worse that web access."

"Oh, come _on!_ Not letting him fix the thing that he broke? After he pled guilty and he's going to accept whatever sentence we give him? I mean, hell, why don't we take back the android body we gave him while we're at it."

"Fine. Vote, letting him fix the computers." The same vote, two against two. This time, however, Maritius voted on the side of Dobson and Ryu, clearly guilty about his previous vote.

"Very well. Guards, bring in the prisoner." Maritius rose. "Someone else tell him the sentence," he said, breaking the protocols of the Tribunal. "I'm too busy for this. I've got things to do." Maritius left the platform and bolted out the door as Derek-16 walked into the room, escorted by the guardsmen. He knew he had made the right choice. There was evidence. And Derek-16 was a Pattern. He couldn't afford to take chances with the lives of those under his command. But why did he feel so guilty about it?

*****

So he was to be exiled. Derek-16 reviewed his actions of the past two days as had become his custom when trying to figure out how to deal with humans. Perhaps he should have gone to Maritius when he'd first felt the Core? But that was doubtful. Major Storough would have been able to convince Maritius that his actions were those of a spy. He thought back along what he could have done while he worked on the three computers in the unit design facility.

So his first action had been correct, to attempt to gather more information before going to Maritius. He had gone wrong past that. Perhaps it was in attempting to create the program to piggyback on the Core invaders? That was simply a channel for gathering more information, which couldn't have been an incorrect decision. Undoubtedly, then, it was how he'd gone about it. He gently soldered in another piece of the water-cooling system for the CPU of the computer, then checked the fan on the heat-exchange portion to see if it was functioning well.

He should have changed the way that he'd gone about piggy-backing the program, then. Obviously, the thing that had gone wrong was that he had alerted the ARM command staff to his actions, without telling him why those actions were being taken. But he couldn't have told them without making himself suspect and having them cut off his access to the web. So, obviously, his actions in blowing out the very computers he was working on and alerting them to his dataweb excursions were the problem.

"I'll have to requisition new hard drives for this computer," he said to the computer specialist who was working on another of the computers.

"I've been meaning to upgrade these, actually. Might as well get four two-hundred petabyte drives, we can slave them to give it some backup capabilities."

Derek-16 nodded and wandered out of the repair facility. But if the correct course of action was to sneak around, to not let them know of his actions, why did that feel dishonorable? Of course, he had been sneaking around in the first place in not telling Maritius that the Core was making inroads into the ARM's dataweb. So, more skulking had been required. Unfortunate. And now, he realized, he had put himself in a situation where the holes he'd opened in the dataweb to increase bandwidth now put all of his friends at risk, because he was not there to guard those holes. Also unfortunate. He would have to do something about that.

At the requisition depot, he asked for two-hundred petabyte hard drives for the computer. "How many," asked the clerk?

He would have to do something to guard those holes. "Five, please." Derek-16 said. He was already to be exiled. If they doubted him, they would find out about the extra hard drive. And then they could wipe it, for all he cared. They could guard the holes themselves, if they kept removing his ability to help them. Derek-16 tried to identify what he was feeling, and he decided _spite_ was the closest.

Of course, the holes were his responsibility in the first place. He began designing programs in his head on the walk back to the repair facility. First, one to watchdog the vulnerable spots. A second, to stealthily augment the ARM defenses by warning them, just slightly, what the Core programs looked like. A third, a heavily-fragmented storage program, so that any information that did piggyback on the Core signal would be stored on the ARM dataweb, but spread across as much of it as could be reached. He jacked the fifth hard-drive into the slot for his external memory backups and dumped the programs into it, along with their orders to spread into as many of the design computers as possible.

He reached the design facility and sat down to install the hard drives. He jerked guiltily when he felt the presence of the computer specialist over his shoulder. "You got five instead?"

"Might as well," Derek-16 answered, fiddling with the hard drive cooling fans.

"That's the spirit. Army's picking up the tab, right?" The computer specialist laughed uproariously, and Derek-16 did his best to chuckle along. He was almost finished with the installation when Storough entered the room, flanked by two guardsmen.

"You all finished in here?" he asked pointedly.

"Near enough," Derek-16 answered. He stood and walked outside with Storough at his side.

Major Storough thrust the backpack into Derek-16's arms. "Standard ARM survival kick. Hatchet, knife, fire kit, flint and steel, all and sundry for wilderness survival. We took out your map and compass, tho. First aid kit and rations as well. Didn't figure you'd be needing those. But we replaced the first aid kit with a precision toolkit."

"Very generous of you, sir," Derek-16 replied.

"Ain't it though?" he answered, then waited. Derek-16 understood what was expected. He turned and began to trudge south, away from Adriata City and any other settlement of the ARM. "Good riddance," Storough called after him.

As he took his first step, Derek-16 called up the sub-program which he had integrated into one of the memory cells of his android. The self-destruct sequence from the mine complex was at two standard months, three weeks, and two days. He did not bother to look at the other digits. It had been two months, three weeks, and two days from the day that he had begun to regard as his birth as a human. He stopped the program with a simple thought, and inwardly stared at the number. He had been human for two months, three weeks, and two days. And now he was dead.

As he walked away from the first home he'd even known, Derek-16 thought, _This must be sadness._


	13. Retrenchment

Over the next few weeks Maritius disappeared from Adriata City. Even virtual conferences were canceled, though the military council held them without him and discussed his latest orders. Commands and order memos continued to flow from his underground living quarters and any queries that reached the top of the chain of command were answered disturbingly fast, day or night. The only personal request was the instillation of a research nanolathe in a fifth room of his apartment, which was accomplished during precisely-dictated hours while he was sleeping in the other room.

While locked away in his living suite, he oversaw the completion of the rail linkage to Hillside and the underground tracks to Beachside. Construction K-bots surveyed the route a future road or rail connection would take to Red Hills. The Sylvanwood stop on the northern train route was finalized, and Mary Jennings received authorization for equipment to begin the first construction of the Sylvanwood site.

But the infrastructure projects were all downgraded in priority, and Dobson and his crews had to make due with resources during non-peak hours. As if in response to Derek-16's betrayal, Maritius was trying to grow a thick shell around himself and the ARM presence as a whole. The wide net of missile defenses and radar towers which had been thrown out along the western coast was extended to the north and south and wrapped around to the east, covering nearly 150 degrees of approach to Adriata City and the other settlements. Construction vehicles 'lathed physical connections to each of the sub-stations that compiled local data from three or four radars, and each of these connections was then made redundant by tall towers for tightbeam laser communications. Highlighting his new obsession with data security, all these communication arrays were rigged with explosives at the base of their towers, and these were triggered to explode if they did not receive a particular signal from Adriata City every three minutes.

An order had come down from the top, railing against the 'haphazard and disorganized approach to unit design since Gating.' In light of the recent compromise of all current ARM unit designs, Maritius directed everyone ranked captain or above to organize a squad for the simulators, and to work out against another squad for a total of ten hours, five spent piloting a particular Arm unit, five spent piloting Core simulations against it. At the end of this there would be a two hour discussion session, picking apart any evident weaknesses, then three hours of redesign work. These squads would be paired up based on a randomized round-robin designed by the AIs, and all majors and design specialists would integrate the recommendations and oversee the redesigns of even the most basic ARM units.

Three probing attacks by Core forces from the sea sent Maritius into another flurry of activity. He handed out a few promotions, raising a new major to head up the newly reorganized research and development division, promoting all his current military advisers to colonel, and jumping a new soldier up to colonel as well, Andrea Trevian, to act as the defensive adviser. Dobson and Storough each had to adjust to the position as base defenses had been treated as a hybrid of the military and construction parts of the council and handled by them. They were given plenty of practice in adjusting, as Maritius made Trevian's first task a total redesign of the base defenses with the addition of another ring outside of all current defenses. Storough, Ryu, and Jennings were put to work picking it apart in the simulators. Recommendations of a move to building sea facilities were rejected, though Maritius did at least put a Chief of the Navy on council's organizational chart. It was left empty.

After this round of orders, and the subsequent de-prioritizing of Sylvanwood to the bottom of the heap, Jennings was prodded by the rest of the council to go talk to Maritius. A few requests for appointments were rejected, as they had been before, and after a few more days she simply marched down the hall and knocked on his door, which no one had yet thought to do. She waited a few moments, knocked again, and soon the door opened.

"Afternoon, colonel," Maritius said. She had been expecting a bleary-eyed wreck, but he was sharp-eyed and alert. His blue hair was gone, replaced with his natural color, and combed. Parted, even. He was also, she noted, wearing standard fatigues with his rank clearly displayed, which she realized she had never seen him in before.

"Good afternoon, Commander."

"Please, come in," he said, sweeping his arm. So far he was much more cordial than she'd expected.

She seated herself on his couch and accepted his offer of tea. While he put the pot on, she looked around the room. It was mainly the same, except for a compact weight set in one corner of the living room, an expanded kitchen facility with cafeteria-style food 'lathes, and a clock mounted above the wall screen with bright red digital numbers. She noticed it was counting up, not down, and was currently just over four months.

"Here you are, Colonel Jennings." Maritius handed her tea and seated himself across the table.

"Thank you." She paused and took a sip, not really ready to start, and not sure what to say when she did. "I came here with a few questions, Maritius, and I'm not . . ."

He held up a hand. "Please. I'd prefer it if you referred to me by rank, colonel." He shook his head. "It's nothing personal, and I'm not trying to enforce the formality. But, at least in my case, I think I needed to be slapped in the face with my responsibilities. I lost track of them for a bit."

Jennings looked at him for a moment. He was fifteen, or was _still_ fifteen, rather, but his bearing was different. Tea instead of beer. Formal ranks. Fatigues. Weights and fitness, when simple medical nano-surgery would do the task. He was trying to be grown up and, Jennings thought, it didn't suit.

"Very well. Commander; regardless of any other issues, your presence has been missed. The change in base morale is noticeable. In a moment when people are dealing with your absence, they then have extra duties, in the form of a heavy construction rotation, or the simulator and re-design work. I believe your absence is having a negative overall impact."

"Are there any particular examples of infractions?" Maritius asked, setting down his tea and taking up his datapad.

Jennings made a show of thinking about it, though she'd had one ready when she entered the door. "Not an infraction, per se, but an example. Work has stalled on the Memorial Cathedral. There was a long list of volunteers signed up at all hours a month ago, but now no one takes any interest in it. The designers say that with winter coming, the tree inside might not do well."

Maritius tapped something into the datapad. "I'll send out an order regarding it," he mentioned.

"No, sir, you won't." Maritius looked up at her quickly. She plunged on as he opened his mouth. "It would be idiotic to dictate to people when they will volunteer. Or tell them when to grieve. Or when to celebrate. You cannot keep leading the way you are, or pretty soon I'll see 'the beatings will continue until morale improves' in my inbox." Maritius gave her a wry smile. "I've been doing some Lost Age reading, too."

Maritius leaned back in his chair and put his hands behind his head. "Alright. You know I'm slow. Tell me where you're going with this."

"You need to lead from the front, sir. And put your finger on what's going on around here. When we found the Core base at Beachside, you went into high gear. A week later we had a new base on the ruins of the biggest Core outpost we've encountered so far. Now there's a new threat, and people are afraid that you're just pulling your head in your shell and expecting to defend your way to safety. And defense may win battles, but not wars. Sorry if I'm being blunt."

Maritius turned his gaze to the clock on the wall and stared at it for a long moment.

"What is that, anyway?" Jennings asked when curiosity got the better of her.

Her commander sucked in air through his teeth. "A countdown since the last time I majorly screwed up. Hopefully I won't have to reset it." Maritius slapped his thighs and stood up. "Alright. What do you suggest I do first?"

"Well, for starters, you could move your goddamn K-bot," Jennings said with a trace of humor. "You parked it next to the cafeteria, so every time anyone goes to get a meal they're reminded that their commanding officer has turned into a hermit."

Maritius rocked on his heels for a moment, considering. "Yeah, I can see how that would hurt morale . . ."

.

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.

The Commander of the True Believers had taken the opportunity of his transport to call a meeting of his lieutenants and catch up on some planning. In truth, he derived a secret pleasure from watching all of his lieutenants try operate at peak efficiency, given the limited bandwidth and spare processor power of the transport ship carrying him. Because he was somewhere over the deserts of Continent B, they were spending at least half their time and energy during the meeting in backstabbing attacks on the datanet, trying to grab themselves a larger share of the limited resources. _Best to keep them sharp_, he thought.

"Would _someone_ please give me a status update on our plans for the ARM base on Continent D?" he asked irritably. The subordinate Patterns digitally scrambled over each other to claim enough bandwidth and power to answer.

There were a few moments of hiss and static until one voice managed to rise above the rest as the Pattern appropriated 40% of the aircraft's onboard processors. "Yessir. I have completed the design of a specialized air transport which will serve as the holding pen for the captive humans for their transport back to our facilities."

"It is an enclosed storage bay?"

"Yes, sir," the Pattern said through the static. "Their fragile bodies will be kept intact until they can be brought back to the Patterning uploaders."

"Good enough," the Commander answered. "Has anyone decided how the attack will progress? Ideas? Anyone?" There was a further pause while his subordinates battled among each other. The Commander took the opportunity to split his consciousness and begin working on troop deployments for a new offensive against the Orthodox units. With another part of his Pattern, he used sensors to gaze out at the air wing surrounding him - four jamming aircraft and four more radar spotters in a passive mode, listening for scraps of enemy radar. A central core of twenty fighters surrounded the transport, and another hundred flew in wings of ten in a patrol sweep ten miles out. He again wondered at the idiocy of his Orthodox opponent, that he would be allowed to slip away from yet another 'last stand.' Perhaps he wasn't meant to die after all. Or perhaps the Orthodox weakling could not bring himself to finish the job.

The hiss again resolved itself. "A heavy attack against the area that was previously the Orthodox research facility. This will include carrier support and extensive air cover, to draw air defenses to the battle. The true attack will advance from thirty miles north, with three air transports guarded by four flights of gunships equipped with anti-air flak missiles."

Another of his lieutenants broke in. "We estimate that the initial attack will at least defeat much of the air cover. Once this is completed, a mixed ground force will be airlifted from just offshore and begin attacking their main facility to the east. During this confusion, the three air transports will land and their bomber escort will carpet-bomb the area with nerve gas. We will load as many humans into the three transports as possible, then the transports will split up and return to base, each accompanied by a portion of the gunship escort."

"Why not simply raid humans from the research facility complex, since this is on the coast."

"We estimate that it will be staffed by lesser humans, as our own forward bases would be stocked with our most expendable Patterns."

The Commander could not fault the logic. "Very good. What of the ground units providing the assault on the main facilities?"

"They will remain on location to eradicate the ARM base. If necessary, three of the Can units will have remote-detonated nuclear devices secretly installed to complete the destruction."

The Commander reached out over the datanet to destroy the Pattern that had spoken, but found he could not because of the same limited bandwidth problem. He marked it for disposal instead, confident that the datanet's watchdog programs would return the Pattern to the scrap heap. "Fool! We are not out to destroy the Arm forces there. They are our key to victory! We want to keep them, and occasionally hunt them. We want them . . . domesticated.

"The ground force should be defeated, eventually, after a long fight. Make sure programs are in place to restrict their energy usage and ammunition allowances after the air transports pull out. We want them destroyed. After that, the naval units should 'give up' and retreat from their beachhead. These Old Humans are always willing to believe that they have persevered despite impossible odds, even in the face of evidence to the contrary . . ."

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.

Eighty miles south of Adriata City, a small mountain range ran northeast to southwest across the landscape. Toward the southwest edge, it joined up with a much larger, more imposing range. On one of the last mountains which could be said to belong to the smaller range, a wide cliff-face dropped five hundred feet straight down, and was accessible by from hiking over a small saddle from the south. In this cliff face was a series of caves, and in the mouth of one of the small caves sat Derek-16. He leaned against the edge of the cave mouth and dangled his legs off the cliff while watching the sun set off to his left.

He had spent most of the hike south retreading the same ground in his mind that he had pondered before he left. He had examined his actions from the moment he first felt the Core Central Consciousness on the ARM's datanet to the moment of his tribunal, but had not been able to come up with any moment in which his actions could have been different. He had made decisions based on the information available to him, and had come to what he felt were the right ones. Still, he could not keep his mind from running back to the events of the last few days leading up to his exile. Eventually he had shut these memories in a partition and encrpyted them. He could still access them, but it would take time to decrypt them, and they could no longer force their way into his thought processes unbidden.

He tried, instead, to think about his next moves. He found himself thinking along lines similar to those when he had been cut off from the CCC back at the mine complex. There, he had compiled all data, made assumptions as to the likelihood of different scenarios, and decided that there was only a 38% change that the Core would find him. He had done the same in this situation, though with many more variables - from what he had learned of his time with the True Humans, they were exceedingly difficult to pin down in predictive models. Even with generous allowances for some actions, he had pegged his chances at being accepted back into the ARM at 18%. That number included the possibility of their taking him back only to execute him. Much more likely that he would wind up back with the Core.

Of course, none of this took his own freedom of action into account. When he had been the Director of the mine complex, his 'body' was a central computer terminal deep underground. He could build himself 'limbs' in the form of solar collectors or radar towers or defensive arrays, but he was confined. Immobile. Now, with the gift on the android body he had received from Maritius, he had options. Choice. If he wanted, he could march across the sea floor to another continent. He could make contact with the Core and offer them all of his knowledge of ARM designs. He did have quite a bit, after all, since he had been working in the unit design labs every night for his two plus months of life. He had a powerful bargaining chip, one undoubtedly strong enough to get himself re-inserted into the CCC dataframes without having to be wiped and reinstalled because of his long absence from Core thought control.

The silence of his surroundings weighed on him. He listened intently to the few sounds around him - wind whistling up the cliff face, distant bird cries, the snap of twigs or cries of animals carried up on the wind from the forest floor at the base of the cliff. But it was not that silence which tugged at him. He realized that the digital hiss of the running self-destruct clock - the clock of his own life - was missing. What is more, he'd become accustomed to it. He realized with some mixture of pleasure and loss that it was a sign of humanity. He recalled a passage of literature that discussed the silence of a household after an ancient grandfather clock, a family heirloom, had broken and gone silent, its ticking pendulum still and calm. He missed his own clock, and he took that longing to be another sign of his growing understanding of the human condition.

He did not _want _to go back to the Core Consciousness. He realized it with a flash. He did not care what the odds were. He did not want the most likely result to _be _the result. He wanted to stay with the ARM, wanted to talk to the people he had grown accustomed to, in the manners he had grown accustomed to. He wanted to stumble around the bar, pretending to be drunk while the true humans - the truly drunk humans - howled with delight. He wanted to pester people with questions until they became exasperated and found intriguing excuses to leave him with someone else. He wanted to go home.

Derek-16 filled the air bladders of the android and then let them out in exasperation. It was not quite a sigh, but it was close. It seemed to help. He tried it again. It didn't help as much the second time.

He may want to go home, but he could not. But if he wanted to go home, he was drawn inevitably to the conclusion that he cared about the people who were there. And if he cared about them, he should be doing everything he could to help them. He found no flaw in that logic. And since he himself had opened up small holes in the ARM datanet, he owed it to them to defend those holes. He could not allow his own feelings of loss and rejection sway him from the path he knew was right. And yes, though he told himself that the addition of some programs on that fifth hard drive would help matters some, there was no way that they would be able to hold off the Core's invasive programs. Core programs learned and adapted, and without further input from Derek-16, the programs on that drive would remain static and unchanging. They'd be useless after the first encounter.

He stared up at the darkening sky as the first stars came out. There _was _the small matter of the Core satellites. He knew where they were, and that certainly wouldn't be changing. He just needed some way to broadcast up to them. He needed a satellite dish, and a power supply. He idly kicked his legs against the cliff face while he searched the sky for one of the satellites he knew would be passing over soon.

He suddenly stopped kicking. He stared down at his legs. He needed metal for a satellite dish. He needed a power supply. In one quick motion he grabbed up the knife from the survival kit, sliced through the android's garments, and went to work cutting off his own leg.

.

.

.

Mairtius decided to ease himself back into base life. Not all of the changes he had made were bad ones, though some went a bit too far. He woke at 6:30 am and went for a jog around the base just after the shift change from the night watch. The early risers were on duty, the rest weren't quite up yet, and those who had been on duty all night had no desire to stay up any longer. He saw a few people, but not too many.

After a quick shower he jumped into the familiarity of his command suit and moved it somewhere else. Colonel Jennings was certainly right; it had loomed over the populated portions of Adriata City like an enormous statue memorializing his absence. He parked it back in a holding lot by a repair hangar, and the simple logistics of the parking problem caused his mind to wander to the problems of parking the vehicles of standard clones at Sylvanwood. He reminded himself to take another look at the building priorities and see if he could free up any resources. Sylvanwood was a good example of his over-correction; it was true that he had needed to put a lot more thought into defenses and military work, but his first steps toward a 'civilian' life on Adriata were also beneficial and should be continued.

Maritius had decided that his first action back in normal life should be exactly what he was making everyone else try; unit design. Once he exited his command suit, he made his way through the mud leftover from a recent rain and stomped his way into one of the old unit design facilities attached to the repair hangar. He was surprised to find someone in the design lab, and a familiar face, at that. Well, a familiar head anyway.

Jervis turned his dreadlocked head at the sound of the door opening, then quickly stood up and came to shake Maritius' hand. "Good ta see you, sir," he said in his thickly accented Standard.

"Good to see you, too, Jervis. What're you doing up at this hour?"

Jervis stuck his head out the door for a moment. "Mornin' again? Hmm . . . what day is it?"

Maritius started to answer, then realized he had to check his datapad. "Wednesday."

"I been up since Sunday, I think," Jervis answered, scratching at his shaggy lion's mane of hair. Maritius could see the line of stimulant derms arrayed neatly on the bottom of Jervis' wrist. At least four were visible before the line disappeared under Jervis' sleeve.

Maritius looked at him, then sniffed gently. Smelled like he'd been in the unit design facility for a lot of that time. "Didn't you have duty?"

Jervis cracked a huge grin. "I'm your Atlas, boss. My CO made it official about a month ago; I'm your transport shadow. Which means, I haven't had no duty since you holed up underground."

Maritius started a reply, but realized the pilot was right. He had holed up. And there were enough pilots to handle the few transport duties that were necessary now that Beachside, Sylvanwood, and Hillside were all plugged into the same transportation network. "So you've been in here, for what, three days?"

"Well, three days with some breaks for the head or food, of course. And sleep when my stim patches run out and the base doctor won't gimme anymore until I get some shuteye. I been in here about three weeks, really."

"Show me whatcha got, then," Maritius said. He took a seat at a neighboring console and began wandering through Jervis' designs. There were a number of small modifications to air transports, naturally, and a few designs for transports either with onboard weaponry for defense or larger models with increased capacity. He had a few thoughts about other aircraft to fill niche roles, mainly built on the familiar Atlas air chassis. But there were a number of ground vehicles and K-bots as well, some utterly outlandish, some with potential. Maritius realized that Jervis' mind was quite fertile, though when he though about it, he wasn't sure why this creativity surprised him at all.

Maritius decided first to call up one of the designs that was highly restricted; the command suit. Only he and a few others whose brainwave sets pre-rated them as design specialists had access to the command suit schematics. It was a highly refined design, naturally, and immensely complex. Many of the shortcuts that made other designs simpler - resource 'lathes, for example - were not available in designing a command suit since it needed to be self-sufficient from the moment it stepped through a Gate. Maritius stared at it for most of an hour before he realized that he regarded it as almost sacrosanct. The design would only be defiled if he started mucking about with it.

A few others entered the design facility with a "Good morning, sir," and if they were surprised to see their Commander up and about, they didn't mention it. Maritius kept staring at the design, twisting it this way and that, making small changes and then removing them almost instantly as he saw the unintended consequences of more armor or different internal wiring.

He felt Jervis looming a moment before the man said, "You know what you need, boss?" Maritius turned to look at him and raised one eyebrow. "Some anti-air. Missiles. Or flak." Maritius surrendered the keyboard for a moment and Jervis started sketching in a new shoulder-mounted system with quick commands.

"Okay, sure, but that'll draw power from the internal systems, and that increases the reload time for a D-gun blast. And that thing's a bit tempermental."

Jervis shook his shaggy head. "Look, just make yourself some 'lathes, they make the missiles, everything's great. No power from the suit at all."

"Okay, but when I Gate, those things are just dead weight on my back."

Jervis cackled his broad-toothed laugh. He hadn't observed much oral hygiene recently, either. "You plannin' on Gatin' in the next week or so, boss? Where you got to be that's so important?" He cackled again at his own joke. "We're not makin' a new suit design that's gonna change the way people think about K-bots, here, sir. We're makin' some new toys for you to use next time it gets down and dirty, right? So you just make something that runs on its own power, and straps onto your back."

Maritius thought about it for a second, then grinned. "You, sir, are a genius. And I'm an idiot. We're not redesigning my suit; we're making self-contained add-ons to it. And I could even swap them out if I wanted to." Maritius took back the keyboard and began sketching.

"Hey, while you're at it, you still need them solar wings? They're kinda girly," Jervis pointed out.

"Alright, I'm through with you," Maritius chided. "Get back to your own work. Make me a transport that can carry other transports or something."

"Why would you need . . . oh, that gives me an idea, though . . ."

Maritius shook his head at the Atlas pilot, then went back to his own work. He took a moment to realize that not only had Colonel Jennings been totally right, she'd been proven right in the first hour he'd spent topside. He had been playing with the command suit design in his own quarters on and off for nearly a month, but all it took was a five minute conversation with a stoned transport pilot to shake him out of his rut. He bent his head back to the backpack design with a vengeance.


	14. Rebirth and Regret

Derek-16 was frankly surprised at some of the things he found is his own body. His memory stored both an accurate schematic and a compilation of all internal feedback and sense data, but even with those two guides to his own android body, the things he found were nonetheless rather shocking. He contained altogether more fluid than he expected.

The precision toolkit had come in extremely handy. After peeling the skin from the leg and stretching it out like a blanket, he went about systematically disassembling all the parts of the leg and arranging them by type - memcomposite muscles, actuators, servos and motors, processors, internal framework, and batteries. The batteries were particularly useful as each one still contained a charge. They were roughly the size and shape of their natural counterparts, and he set aside the energy-packed 'femur' for later use.

After looking at the parts arrayed before him, he realized he needed more than he had. A quick internal scan led to some decision-making - he couldn't bear to part with either hand since there was so much precision work to be done, and the difference in mobility between one leg and no legs was a large drop in efficiency . . . his torso, however, housed many secondary and tertiary systems which were not strictly necessary. Guts it was, then. In went the knife, and out came a large portion of the contents of his 'stomach' region. These were picked apart and sorted as well.

Derek-16 worked for thirty two hours building his receiver. At the end of that time he had a radar dish perched on a tripod made of the android's bones, which provided both structure and power. Eight small actuators controlled the movement and alignment of the dish and were soldered in place atop the tripod. The dish itself was made of the long axis of the femur, topped with a bit of the receiving equipment he had poached from the side of his skull. The body of the parabolic dish was formed out of a framework of smaller battery cells and internal frame pieces. Derek-16 had carefully picked apart the individual layers of the metallic musculature and strung it between the frame pieces to form the actual reflective surface of the dish. He painstakingly covered it in layer after layer, attempting to make the dish uniformly thick across its entire surface.

At the end of the process, he pointed the dish at himself and spent five minutes holding perfectly still and sending a uniform radio signal at the dish. He then examined the signal that had been received by his dish - not a uniform signal in terms of strength but a collection of peaks and valleys based on the unavoidable inconsistencies of the structure of the reflector. He dashed off a quick program to correct for the lack of uniformity and tried it again. Closer, but not quite. He tweaked the program, tried again, tweaked the program, until his dish was receiving a signal nearly identical to the one he was sending.

Then he pointed the dish at the sky.

The first satellite which came by told him nothing. He had manually charted the location of the satellite based on astronomical charts in his memory, and the dish seemed to be tracking something across the sky. It could have just been following the course he'd programmed, but even if he were off by a small amount, he expected at least something. The second provided no information either, though he thought he might have heard something, and a replay of the stored signals confirmed there was a spike at one point.

The third one paid off. As near as he could tell, the dishes were severely out of alignment, but the sheer strength and number of the Core transmissions meant that he was picking up snatches of all sorts. He was getting anywhere between four and seven separate instances of simultaneous transmissions, and could not quickly sort them out. By the time the dish passed over the other horizon, he had more data than he was able to sift. He set the dish to automatically begin tracking the satellite when it next appeared and he went to work unraveling the different signals he had received.

After one half hour, he had determined that two were encoded and one was made up of nothing more than routine traffic to allow the satellite to remain in the correct orbital alignment. After removing these three threads from the tangle (cracking the encryption would take too long and the routine bandwidth would be useless), he had only four separate signals to turn into data that he could analyze. The satellite came around again while he worked and another full batch of data was dumped into the dish's memory, but Derek-16 ignored it and focused instead on the data he had already started to decipher.

It took him two more revolutions until he realized that one of the data streams was using a different code, an ancient architecture that hadn't been used on Core datanets for millenia. Only a very few Patterns, those who made a study of such things, would know enough to program in that language. He himself knew enough to recognize the code, but had no idea what the programs meant or even how to begin to decipher them. Which meant . . . . which meant that there were some among the Core who didn't want others to know what they were doing. There must be a mutiny, or a civil war, in progress. He put such things from his mind, however. He knew enough to know that he couldn't possibly understand that data streams, and concentrated on the three that were left.

Slowly, as he meticulously sifted through the probabilities of different types of transmissions, a picture resolved. The data being sent was, for the most part, tracking and coordinates for a huge number of Core units. The longitude and latitude put them less than two hundred miles off the coast of Beachside, where they were holding position to wait for further troops and instructions.

A Core invasion force was a day's steam away from the coast. He had to tell his friends. But he would never reach them in time. Unless the Core held position. But how could the ARM not be monitoring satellites? They would know about this! They would be expecting it. But if they weren't . . . the results would be catastrophic. Maybe he could send a message. But all he had was a receiving dish and the location of Core satellites which, if the ARM were tracking, they would already know what he had to tell them and, if they weren't tracking them, his message would never be heard. He had to get there. He had to tell them in person.

Derek-16 hauled himself upright using the cave wall and slowly, carefully made his one-legged way out onto the ledge above the cliff . . .

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Maritius eyed his opponent warily and circled, never losing sight of it. It was cut, deeply, but not yet finished. He risked a glance at the sky, checking the conditions, then hefted the heavy, double-headed axe from his shoulder. In a flash he brought the axe head around swiftly, horizontal to the ground, and it thudded deep into his opponents body. It started to tip.

"Timber! Tiimmbbeeeeerrr!" Maritius yelled and waved his arms, but everyone had the good sense to be far away from where a fifteen-year-old boy was taking his first try at chopping down a tree. "Do people yell timber?" he asked of no one in particular. "Is that a real thing?"

"Might as well, boss," Jervis said with a grin. The tree settled onto the ground more gently than he would have thought as the branches beneath the trunk snapped and broke the fall somewhat. "Was that where you were aiming?"

Maritius eyed the fallen giant. "Yes," he lied. "Dead on."

The noise had brought others from the work crew to help, and they were soon swarming over the fallen trunk and lopping off branches. Maritius found himself working next to now-Colonel Jennings.

"Afternoon, Mary," he said.

"Sir," she responded. "You're looking well."

"Thank you," he nodded. "But just so I don't mistake this for a vacation, how about you give me an update on the progress up here?"

Jennings guffawed. "Sure thing. First off, things were progressing well until an axe-wielding madman showed up . . . " "You're welcome." ". . . and started busting up the place. Seriously though, it is progressing well. There has been a restructuring of some of the command hierarchy." Maritius fixed her with his single raised eyebrow. "Your instincts were right regarding the split between the posts of Conservationist and Geneticist. There was a small mix-up, where the Geneticist was pointing out the she could not perform her work without access to modern laboratory equipment, and the Conservationist pointed out that she didn't need to do her work at Sylvanwood, it just had to end up here. As she put it, 'We don't need the cow up here from the time it's in a test-tube, just from the time it's a cow.' So I authorized the Geneticist's request to set up at Red Hills, and we just have a decanter here at Sylvanwood, to make the transport easier."

"Makes sense. Anything else?"

"Not much. It'll be a few months before any of the species are grown and decanted, flora or fauna, so we've got time to get some things set up. There's a crew dedicated to the machine shop, and they've been dusting off old tractor designs and low-maintenance vehicles for use around here. They're getting a little too into it, if you ask me. Other than that, we're still at the design phase for most of the basics around here. There are some final tweaks going on, but those are nearly finalized. Once we get those in, we just . . ."

"Sorry, one second." Maritius glanced at his datapad, which warned him of a new message but didn't have any of the details. "Dammit. Too far away from my suit."

"Where did you park, anyway?" Jennings asked.

"Shimmied into the underground lot. I didn't want to have to look at it. Ruins the whole 'nature' vibe if that thing's staring at me all day," he said. He jogged off toward the entrance to the undergound lot, where his command suit's far stronger communications arrays would have picked up the message. Sure enough, the full text dropped into his inbox once he was within sight of the suit.

It was from the duty officer of the watch in Adriata City. He skimmed it briefly. "Oh, what the hell's he thinking . . ?" he asked aloud.

"What is it?" Jervis asked. Maritius still hadn't quite adjusted to the fact that Jervis' order were to stay close to Maritius, the command suit, and his own Atlas at all times. He wasn't quite sure how those conflicting goals resolved themselves.

"The Pattern that we kicked out. I just got the heads up that he wandered back into Adriata City, all torn up. Babbling something about there being two Cores on planet. Looks like the wilderness scrambled his circuits," Maritius glared at the datapad for a moment, then sent a simple 'acknowledged' in response. "He can wait. That's what the brig's for . . ."

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The hiss of water along the bows was the only sound audible in the dark night. The True Believer ships plunged through the light swell, steaming for the western shores of Continent D and the location of the now-destroyed Orthodox naval research facility. Though the night was dark and silent, the local Core command dataweb of the strike force was humming with chatter.

"CAN-6725, locking mechanism defect, cannot attach to transport." "Authorized: fifteen seconds of 'lathe time in two minutes and forty seven seconds. If unsuccessful, CAN-6725 downgraded from mission capable status." "Fluctuations in primary drive buffers of DEST-102 propulsion system, switching to auxiliary to maintain speed." "All units, all units, this is HC-14, local command officer. Mission is a go in five seconds, repeat, go in three, two, one, mark."

The fleet, with a central core of nine capital ships and over forty lighter screening units, split into a pre-planned offensive formation of three discrete groups. Behind the advance force came eight smaller landing craft, armored and armed for a landing under fire. Behind all those, a secondary fleet of large freighters and carriers came to a stop. The carriers launched the first wave of the assault: wings of fighter-bombers destined for the radar stations directly north and south of Beachside. As soon as the aircraft left the launch areas they were replaced by transports, ready and waiting to lift off and take the ground units from the freighters deep inland for the assault on Adriata City itself.

The fighter-bombers sped low and fast past the vanguard of the Core screening forces, headed toward the eyes and ears of the ARM defenses around Beachside.

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"Evening, Jasper."

"Evening, Lieutenant." The watch officer of the deep night watch had just entered the station control room, bringing with her the smell of hot coffee.

"Any news?"

"No ma'am. Routine traffic along the air routes to Adriata City, and a late-night train just came in from Hillside. Otherwise, no movement along the edges." The radar operator leaned back and tried to ignore the smell. He had another half hour until he could sack out in his bunk, and coffee would just mess that up. He'd have to push through 'til then.

"No problems with the equipment?"

He shook his head. "No ma'am. Just conducted both weekly and monthly maintenance yesterday, by the logs. Everything checked out."

The lieutenant came to lean over the console. "Then we've got a problem."

Four faint signatures appeared at the western edge of the sensor sweep, moving at a speed consistent with sizeable naval ships. "Get visuals on those and move secondary sensors to tight sweep in that area."

"Yes ma'am." The structure rumbled as engines drove the secondary systems along their pivots to track the new bogies. "Confirm naval ships, likely Core destroyers."

The lieutenant slapped the general alarm, sending signals speeding to the radar station's sirens, to Beachside central command, to the regional radar headquarters, to the nearest tightbeam tower for redundant transmission, and to Adriata City directly. Unbeknownst to her, and in the same instant, four Core fighter-bombers had just cleared the seaside cliffs a half mile from the radar installations and sent commands to loose their own missiles - two missiles a piece, each with three independent warheads, all set to passively track the strongest nearby radar signature. The Core bombers banked to the left in tight formation and sped off to the north and the next radar station, confident that their job here was complete.

The tracking outpost disappeared in a blaze of light and sound just as the first alarms began wailing back in Adriata City.

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The handful of ARM citizens carving Sylvanwood out of the wilderness were gathered around an open campfire when their datapads began ringing the general alarm. Most were asleep at the edge of the fire's light. Two were standing watch nearby, and were the first to react.

"Up and out! Core attack at Beachside, full alert!"

Jennings was on her feet and running toward her Maverick with her datapad out. She tripped over something in the dark and went down hard on both hands. Her datapad flipped off into the darkness and she scrambled to find it before the backlight turned off. "Jennings! Where are you? Report!" She heard Maritius yelling behind her, and she turned to see two faint lights bobbing toward her. She snatched up her datapad and went back to skimming the first reports while she waved toward the lights.

Maritius jogged past her and she darted to catch up. Jervis was pounding along right behind.

"I'm heading back to Adriata city," Maritius said. "Get everyone here rounded up and move them toward Hillside. That's the nearest defense."

Mary nodded, then realized it was useless in the darkness. "Yessir. I'll requisition a train if I can, and follow the train tracks otherwise."

"Right. You're in charge of the people here. I'll send along orders as I can, when the situation . . ." Maritius glanced down as another priority message warbled. He skimmed the report - a jumble of automated responses and individual reports passed up the chain of command. "Aircraft inbound on Adriata City, two vectors. No response from Beachside. Overwhelming force estimates." His voice trailed off and he stared up at the sky. "I'm still going back to Adriata . . . but . . ." He came to a stop and glared down at his datapad in indecision. "Ah, shit," he muttered, finally. Resigned. "By the book. Jervis, get up in five minutes. We're going to Red Hills. Colonel Jennings, proceed to Hillside and take command of all defenses there. We have to assume that our communications will be compromised. I will be off the grid until I reach Red Hills and can use secure lines again." He spoke as if he expected his words to be precisely repeated in the history books. Or a tribunal. "Local commanders will have to see to the defense of Adriata City."


	15. Thrust and Parry

The fires were still burning.

This was the first thing Maritius noticed as his Atlas come in low over Adriata City to touch down on Gate Hill. There were huge swathes of the ruins that were still aflame. Construction K-bots moved among the ruins, serving as emergency services personnel, but in many places the best they could do was to keep the fires away from the lanes they'd cut through the rubble. It was two days later and the fires were still burning.

Maritius had been awake for the past two days thanks to an emergency injection of stimulants and medical nanobots. He had spent the time building up the Red Hills infrastructure - particularly in power generation and in air defenses in outlying rings. While he 'lathed, he sifted through the reports that filtered out of Adriata City and into the Red Hills local 'web. Most of the city was destroyed, production capacity was a fraction of its former maximum, and all the fusion plants were gone, creating gaping holes both in the landscape and in the power generation matrix of the ARM bases. While Hillside still pumped out its massive quantities of metal, the repair and relief efforts were being hampered by the lack of available energy. Over 1,000 were confirmed dead, injuries twice that number, and two hundred were missing and presumed dead, buried in the rubble. The attack had been efficient and absolute.

After the initial wave of Core ground forces touched down it had taken over ten minutes for the ARM to mount an effective resistance. Two counter-attacks were beaten back, as the Core units used base facilities as shielding and kept the ARM units from firing for fear of doing more damage to their own base. Long-range artillery dished out most of the damage for the Core, leaving their ground forces in the base free to attack ARM units and leave the structures to the heavy guns. A counter-attack - spearheaded by Colonel Storough - was finally successful in dislodging the Core from the buildings of Adriata City. Once the Core forces were in the relatively open areas around the base, it was a simpler matter for the ARM units to divide the group with their greater speed and cut them down piecemeal. An air wing of Brawler gunships had taken advantage of the confusion to cut down most of the heavy artillery ringing the base and free Adriata City from bombardment.

"Report for you, sir." The voice stirred Maritius from his reverie. He strode down the hill and began 'lathing the nearest fire, just to give him something to do. Maritius responded to the messenger's hail and opened a video link on his HUD.

"Sir, we have just pieced together sensor footage and some witness testimony from the attack. It appears that the gunship raid from the northwest was not just a diversionary tactic. They were accompanied by air transports. Additionally, medics have confirmed that some of the casualties and injuries from around the living quarters had traces of a nerve agent in their system which causes motor paralysis. The area around the living quarters was saturated with this nerve agent, but it was used nowhere else on the battlefield."

Maritius took only a few seconds to piece together the implications. "Are you telling me that soldiers were kidnapped from the living quarters?"

"That is the assumption, sir. We believe Colonel Ryu saw this action in progress - or one of his pilots did - which was why he took much of the air corps off in pursuit of the gunships. We found wreckage of numerous Core gunships and ARM fighters, but the air transports were not in the wreckage, we believe."

"Did Ryu report why he chased after them?"

"Sir, we haven't heard from Colonel Ryu since the attack. I thought you were aware." The reporting captain paused for a moment. "Colonel Storough also wished that you see a copy of the transcript of the preliminary interrogation of the captured Core Pattern." It took Maritius a moment to work out that he was referring to Derek-16 and not another Pattern captured in the raid. "It made repeated reference to the danger of an impending attack."

"Where is the Pattern now?"

"It was being held under guard in the living quarters. The one that was raided, Commander."

Maritius stared down into the fire he was 'lathing. "Wonderful . . ."

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Derek-16 sat as best he could in the corner of the large container. As far as he could tell from the layout, he was on the inside of a converted Core mass storage container. His cellmates were twenty-odd humans who were just regaining consciousness after being thrown into the container a few hours before. As a side effect of the gas that was used to render them unconscious, most were emptying the contents of their stomachs. Because of the size of the container, this generally meant that they were unavoidably doing this on one another.

Derek-16 had been thrown into the container along with the rest when the Core support K-bots had burst through the thin walls of the living quarters. He assumed that the android's body had looked similar enough to a human's that he had been taken inadvertently. The lack of a leg and the damage to his internals were easily explained away; the prisoners had been spirited away in the midst of a battle, after all. And he thanked his luck that the ARM technicians had removed his external broadcasting equipment when he was captured by the ARM - they had not wanted him to access the ARM dataweb, and because of this the Core datanet was also out of reach. Sometime soon, however, his luck would change; when a Core Pattern got to wondering how there was a live human with no stomach in their container. It would not take much poking and prodding before he was revealed as an android.

As worrisome as that eventuality was, he did not think that his current situation would lead anywhere good, either. The twenty vomit-stained humans - likely seventeen, actually, as three seemed to have died while unconscious, despite Derek-16's unskilled attempts to help them - would soon regain some control of themselves, and would realize that they were with a Core Pattern who had been found guilty of treason, and that they had been captured by the Core. No matter that Derek-16 had been captured as well, and no matter that his 'treason' had taken place some weeks before their capture; if he had learned anything recently of the human mind it was that finding someone to blame usually took precedence over the rational assessment of available data. Derek-16 wasn't sure what the tensile strength of the android's body was, but assumed that with enough determination the humans would be able to inflict sufficient damage to render him non-functional.

He suddenly grinned at his own thought processes. 'Non-functional' was such a bland term. Whether it was from the ARM prisoners with him or the Core soldiers outside submerging him in the Central Consciousness, he was about to die.

He felt a sudden shift in the flight trajectory, a sharp drop which seemed to remove most of the weight from his body for a long moment. This induced another round of retching from the True Humans with him. Weight returned with a short, sharp thrust, then a gentle bump as the aircraft touched down.

The rear of the container opened to reveal four drone support K-bots, flanked by ten A-Ks. The support 'bots marched in and began grabbing humans by arms and legs and carrying them outside, wordlessly. The dead humans were moved as well and all were piled outside. Derek was carried and deposited outside as well. He glanced around in the bright sun. They were on the edge of a long marshy tidal flat on one side and a scrub forest on the other. The transport had touched down on a paved landing strip, and two others were waiting to land as well. He could see a number of flak cannons and missile defenses, all anti-aircraft, all Core designs, and five long, low temporary structures at the edge of the paved area. Another support K-bot - this one festooned with a ridiculous array of short-range sensory devices - was marching around the pile, closely examining individual humans. The three dead ARM soldiers were singled out from the crowd and dragged to one side. The medical K-bot came to a stop in front of Derek-16.

Almost instantly he found himself flipped over and grasped by four of the mindless humanoid 'bots. The medical K-bot kneeled at his head and placed a manipulator on the back of the android's skull to hold it still. He felt a warm ooze of nanobots being lathed onto his skin.

"Communicative query?" The voice impeded on his thoughts. He had forgotten what it was like to converse digitally with a true Pattern.

"Acknowledge query. Communication affirmative." The question was such a basic function that a smaller, nearly autonomous portion of Derek-16's mind answered it. A human would have regarded it as a reflex action; Derek-16 saw it as an uncontrolled response. He angrily marshaled all his scant processing power to the sole control of his higher functions.

"Designation?"

"Derek-16."

"Syntax error. Unknown designative schema." Derek-16 felt the Pattern break contact and run for a higher-up. Shortly, a commanding officer made contact. Derek-16 felt the familiar but long-forgotten sensation; a Pattern in contact with him, and through him all other Patterns in his region, and through them to the Central Command of the planet, and through the Central Command all Patterns on the entire planet, and through them . . . nothing. Derek-16 literally stopped thinking for a moment. Where he had expected the Core Central Consciousness to be, there was a gaping hole. It was as if a portion of the sky had ceased to exist, or a fundamental color was suddenly gone from the world.

"Who are you and what are you doing in that shell?" He felt other regional Patterns - marked by their designations as member of the command staff - crowd around their digital conversation.

"I am Derek-16. I am a citizen of the ARM on this planet. I request that I be put in touch with them to negotiate my release."

The Pattern did not answer immediately, but instead interfaced directly with Derek-16's pattern and input a series of override codes, to no effect. "CST-857, requesting authorization of global override codes . . . affirmative . . . negative . . . so noted." The Pattern focused its attention back on Derek-16 and input a new series of override codes. Derek's long-term memory and related functions unfolded and blossomed in the digital space like a flower growing on time-lapse film. There were small transmissions of shock like fireworks as the command staff peered at Derek-16's recent history.

"Interesting," the officer intoned. "Very interesting. CST-10429, rig this traitor to the Pattern replicator. His intel would be too valuable to lose. The Patterning of the humans should continue on regardless. Feed and wash all those strong enough for transport to the Commander's location. Those too weak for transport should be Patterened now. They likely won't make it through the process, but we might as well . . ."

Derek-16 felt another short burst of an override code before his Pattern was rendered immobile, putting his consciousness on pause. For the captured Pattern, the world ceased to exist.

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Maritius was seated at the side of Ryan Storough's hospital bed. Mercifully, the medical facilities had been spared any damage whatsoever, being away from the fusion plants which had gone nova, as well as the location of any serious bombardment. Maritius had called a face-to-face meeting of his advisory council (over the objections of Storough's doctors) and gathered them together at Storough's bedside. Storough himself was full of drugs and tubes, and Jack Dobson looked like he had spent the last three days in a tumble dryer. Jennings was the most alert of any of them, having arrived from Hillside only a short time previously. Maritius tried not to think of Ryu, who was missing and presumed dead, or the defensive specialist he'd promoted to the council. He realized that he had never met her after her promotion, and now she was dead in the attack.

"First off, I'm taking a rescue operation off the table," Maritius began. "It isn't feasible, we don't have the forces, and we have plenty else to do. It chaps my ass, believe me, but it's the kind of call Commanders have to make, and I'm making it. Any objections?" No one could disagree with the logic.

"Second, priorities. We need to get the cloning facility going again. And to do that we need more power. Dobson, we need to shift our focus from search-and-rescue to infrastructure - I want fusion plants up and running as soon as possible. That's what we're doing until we get back up to at least 50% of our previous power levels."

"No defensive repairs, sir?" Jennings asked.

"I don't see the point there, either. We just got pounded into the ground. Until we rebuild past where we were before, the odds would say that it could happen again at any time. So I'd rather put more effort into infrastructure now for a greater payback later. We've going to be vulnerable for the next while no matter how we do it. Any other recommendations for construction?"

Storough spoke up. "I think we need another cloning plant." His voice was ragged from smoke inhalation. "Red Hills, probably. Hillside would make sense, too, but it's more of a military target. Red hills is less likely to draw an attack."

"I agree with the placement, what's the logic on another plant?" Dobson asked.

"Redundancy. And we might actually need the capacity sometime. Lots of empty billets to fill."

Maritius nodded. "Third thing. I want the next person we decant to be an Investigator."

All three of his Council were stunned for a moment, then began making non-committal noises of discontent. Mary finally found her words. "Sir, I think that might be excessive. We don't have evidence that you were negligent in any . . ."

Maritius waved a hand. "We don't have evidence and we won't be looking for it. The Investigator will. I want to know if my actions - or inactions - contributed in any way to the loss of life here. The Investigator will lay that to rest. Any of you have any experience with one?" Maritius asked, doubting that anyone would. Investigators were used when a Commander would normally be brought under court-martial, but the only superior officers were back through an inactive Galactic Gate. Investigators solved this problem by possessing tribunal authority above any other authority in the ARM military. Generally, any mistake large enough to warrant an Investigator would be enough to cause any mission to fail. For a commander to be brought up on charges, but then for the ARM to triumph on that world and reactivate the Gate so that such news could come through, was an extremely uncommon occurrence.

"I do," Storough said softly. The creak to his voice caused them all to lean forward to hear him. "One of my Gate memories is from Julianus. I spent a year and a half there. Our military council forced an Investigation on the Commander there for negligence and endangerment. It took four months, all the time we were fighting a defensive battle against the Core."

"What happened?" Jennings asked.

"He was found guilty. The Investigator sent an authorization that the Commander's brainwave set should be wiped from the Cloning Registry for 'flaws contributing to ineffectual command'. Then he requisitioned all the excess construction power to get enough of the Gate back online to run a wire through, and transmit the data. That's when my brainwave set got backed up and added as a Gate memory to my personality." He paused for water from a line near his mouth. "The Gate went silent two days after our data came through. That Investigator doomed everyone on Julianus to death, just to get word back that a Commander should be wiped from the Registry."

There was a moment of silence that began to stretch toward discomfort. Maritius broke it: "And he may have saved countless more lives by ensuring that the Commanders of the ARM were fit for duty. And I'm sure that the same will happen here, if I am unfit." He paused for a moment. "So that is my order. You three will pick an Investigator from the available . . . actually, no. Colonel Storough, do you recall the name of the Investigator?"

Storough stared up from his hospital bed at Maritius. His eyes seemed dead. Drained. "Crumax Rhett."

"How did you find his conduct?"

"He was a little prick," Storough answered flatly.

"Colonel Jennings, please decant Investigator Crumax Rhett as soon as possible."

Jennings glanced once at Dobson, then simply nodded, knowing that the order could not be ignored. "Will there be anything else, sir?"

"No, I believe . . ." Maritius stopped speaking and his eyes glazed over as he received a virtual notification. "Pardon? Uhhh, roger, authorized. Put it through."

Maritius leaned back in his chair as the others glanced at him curiously. The speaker overhead came alive with a slight static hiss. "Commander Maritius?" The voice spoke in even, measured tones, with a hint of culture in the slightly accented Standard.

"Speaking," he answered.

"Greetings. I am speaking with you in regard to the kidnapped ARM soldiers currently in Core possession." Maritius' eyes narrowed. Jack Dobson sat bolt upright, and Mary Jennings immediately whipped out her datapad and began typing queries to the dataweb operators currently on duty. "Allow me to explain a few things from the start. First of all, I am speaking with you through a high-altitude spotter aircraft, which is relaying my data to one of your operable sensor stations in, I believe you call it, Adriata City. You could shoot it down, but it would only end our conversation. And it is no threat to you; obviously, your location is currently known. Secondly, yes, I am a Pattern of the Core. Your soldiers were kidnapped by a faction of the Core of this planet. I am of another faction. So I do not have your soldiers, nor am I calling about ransom.

Maritius waved his subordinates into stillness. "I have never heard of factions within the Core. You will forgive my disbelief."

"You are right to be skeptical. I am your enemy, and will continue to be so regardless of the outcome of our conversation. Let me simply say this: you do not need to believe me. By now I assume that you have made a tactical assessment of your position and have decided against a rescue operation of your soldiers. Is this correct?" The Pattern waited ten seconds. "Very well, your answer is not required. I will assume this is correct, as it is the tactically and strategically appropriate choice. I will proceed on this assumption.

"You have decided not to pursue a rescue operation. Because of this, I am offering to rescue them for you and deliver them to you. Here is where you wonder why I would do this." Maritius again didn't answer, but did take the time to roll his eyes at the pontificating of the Pattern. Dobson stifled a guffaw, despite the circumstances. "It relates, of course, to the factions of which I previously spoke. There is a laboratory where I previously conducted much of my research. It is near to where you have built Adriata City. It is well hidden; I doubt you have found it, and it would be difficulty without the coordinates I will give you. I desire unfettered access to this laboratory for a short time. In return for this, I will rescue your kidnapped soldiers to the best of my faction's ability. I warn you, however; some have already died in transit, and others did not survive the Patterning process when subjected to it.

Maritius cleared his throat. "You return my soldiers and I simply have to allow you access to this research station? Why would you not just attack it? You clearly know we are almost helpless at the moment."

"It is a question of geography. To mount an attack on your location - one which guarantees success without damage to the research station - would involve more resources than I currently have at my disposal."

"Suppose I agree. You understand, of course, that I would regard no deal as completed until all my soldiers are safely on the ground and in my custody."

"Correction, Commander: as many soldiers as are alive and can be rescued. And of course this would be necessary to our agreement. I propose this: you move as many forces as you would like to the region of the research laboratory, respecting a 500 meter perimeter around it. If you go any closer or make any move to capture the contents of the research station, it will be detonated and your soldiers killed. I will bring your soldiers to you in three transports, and a fourth transport will bring K-bots to enter the research facility. Once the first has landed, my K-bots will be give access to the research laboratory. The first and second transports will take off empty. After the third transport has unloaded your soldiers, my forces will board it and leave the area. At such time, all agreements between us are dissolved."

Maritius stared around at his council. Storough was clearly the worse for wear, and a doctor had entered the room during the discussion to tend to his erratic vital signs. Jennings was still dealing with the information on her datapad, and only Dobson had any input; a shrug. Maritius sighed. "Give me the coordinates . . ." The Pattern relayed them onto the ARM dataweb.

"Remember, Commander. Make no attempt to enter the research facility, and remain 500 meters away at all times. Goodbye."

Maritius stared at the coordinates on his datapad, no more than thirty miles northwest of the limit of Adriata City.

"Oh, the Investigator is just going to _love_ this," Storough growled.

.

.

.

Of the fifty eight ARM personnel who were taken as prisoners, thirty five were left to be transported to the main facilities of the True Believers. Six had died in transport to the temporary facility, fourteen had died during the Patterning procedure. Three more had been killed by one of their compatriots at their request, rather than be Patterned. The thirty-five remaining ARM personnel would be transported to the facilities of the True Believers to be Patterned there, and to undergo any other procedures the Commander of the True Believers saw fit to put them through.

Much to Derek-16's surprise, the Core forces had reactivated him. He assumed he had been Patterned, as three days had passed since he was shut down, but he could do nothing about that now. What he could do was attempt to aid the other prisoners, which is what he did.

Two of the imprisoned had been 'drinking buddies,' of his, as the term went, before his expulsion from Adriata City. One of them had died in Patterning, apparently, but the other had been relatively uninjured in the assault and the subsequent transportation. Derek-16 had avoided contact with the other prisoners, but this one had actively sought him out. "Derek, we've got to help these people." He gestured at the other 'healthy' prisoners, a ragged collection of non-lethal but sometimes serious injuries.

Derek-16 looked up at his friend, Cahn. "I should warn you, it is very likely that the Core has re-instated by broadcasting equipment and is recording everything through my senses, without my permission."

Cahn looked at him and shrugged. "I'm not talking about a prison break, I'm talking about decent food. Crutches. Basic supplies. These people have no idea how to deal with humans, let alone prisoners of war."

Derek-16 shrugged. "I do not know what I can do. I have been branded a traitor and switched off."

"But they switched you back on." Cahn took a long look at the wreckage of Derek-16's android frame. "What did they do to you anyway?"

"I did this to myself," Derek-16 answered. Cahn looked at him sideways. Derek-16 shrugged again and proceeded to tell the story from the beginning - his conversion to the ARM, his sensing of the Core presence in the datanet, his design of programs to both subvert the datanet's defenses and to counter-spy on the core. He told of his tribunal and exile, his flight into the wilderness, his change of heart, and his hike back to Adriata City bearing the warning. He told it all, in perfect detail, not caring if the Core were snooping on his communications since they already had full and unfettered access to his memories anyway. And Cahn seemed to believe him.

"So, if you truly want to help the ARM soldiers, you've got some right here. How do we help?"

"We can't," Derek-16 said with some finality.

But over the next few hours, he thought of his conversation. For some reason, putting his struggle and his story into words - into a single, succinct narrative - changed the way he'd viewed it. He had been living it as his life, but it was an exceptional story. And he was still a Director, far better than these guard Patterns who strut about in their A-Ks and abused the prisoners. _They switched you back on_. Cahn's words played over and over in his mind.

Derek-16 began to throw together a Production Request Form, painstakingly thorough. He outlined better nutrition, improved housing, medical supplies, crutches, bandages, seating in the transport ships, bathroom facilities in-flight, everything he could think of. He blatantly over-stated the fragility of the human body, inflating the number of personnel who might die and making veiled references to the wrath of the Commander when more of his prisoners were killed. He topped it off with a pile of bureaucratic niceties. Feasibility studies, impact memos, deleterious effects projections, every bit of red tape that he'd ever endured as the director of an enormous mine complex. He accessed his external communications and interfaced with the nearest guard, uploading the request directly into a sub-routine of the Guard's pattern. He grinned as the Pattern reacted as he thought it would; passing the report on up the chain-of-command in a knee-jerk, reflexive action to shirk responsibilities.

Three minutes later, the highest officer present stomped into the prisoners' cell. "You are a traitor. You have no standing. You will cease such activities at once."

"Was there a flaw in my Production Request?" Derek-16 asked. His direct Pattern-to-Pattern interfacing was a bit rusty, but when he had been a member of the Central Conciousness, he had ranked three full grades and six sub-grades higher than this Pattern. With the addition of his newly quasi-human traits of deceit and haughtiness, he might just have the edge.

"No. But your Pattern is no longer recognized by the Central Consciousness."

"If there is no problem with the Production Request, why would it not be carried out?"

"It is not in keeping with the goals and priorities of the Core," the officer answered. There was a moment of hesitation, however.

"Was this lack of vision reflected in either the deleterious effects projection or any of the impact memos?" Continued questions. Continued haranguing. Superiority. Deceit. Half-truths.

"No." The officer paused. "Your request . . . . your request . . . the production . . . . ." The officer abruptly cut off the interface.

Three hours later, the production of the new facilities and transport ships was completed.

Two days later, they saved the life of every prisoner.


End file.
